Tag Archives: music

Opinion

The end of WMA?

The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.

But one thing missing from the articles is that this also pretty much spells the end of Microsoft’s WMA.

Right now, when you buy a song from iTunes you get a file with AAC encoding. AAC is the follow-up to MP3 and is both higher quality and, unlike the latter, requires no payment for distributing a player. [ Update 2007/04/10: Okay, I got this bit wrong. There are royalties for selling a player or encoder. However, distributing content is free. For a low margin service such as the iTunes Store this makes perfect sense. Plus, the fact that AAC is not controlled by a single organisation makes it more desirable overall. ] That is, it’s an industry standard. What is non-standard about iTunes is the FairPlay DRM system.

WMA is Microsoft’s attempt to tie music playing to Windows. Both the file format and the DRM scheme they use is proprietary, tying you to Windows Media Player (only now getting usable with version 11) and one of the few PlaysForSure devices you see, dusty and unloved, next to the latest iPods. Even Microsoft’s Zune uses a different scheme.

Previously there was an advantage, if more potential than actual, in that the WMA gave you a greater choice of on-line music store and music player. But the new EMI songs will be in AAC format that it playable on most recent portable music players, including the Zune.

Why would Creative licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

And those stores that compete with iTunes? They can also use AAC, which doesn’t require payment to Microsoft for its use and can be used on an iPod (which WMA can’t).

Why would Yahoo licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

Microsoft have spent the last five years chasing the iPod and Apple’s “closed” system. With Zune they finally have achieved parity. Only now they find that the landscape has changed again. How will they respond?

Links

UK music biz wins right to sue AllofMP3 here

This is a bit of a weird one. For those that have not come across it, AllOfMP3 is a Russian competitor to music downloading sites like Apple’s iTunes Music Store. It distinguishes itself by offering higher quality (good), in a number of different formats (good), without digital restrictions managements (also good) and for a much lower cost.

(DRM is the bit in iTunes that stops you burning your purchases more than five times or streaming to more than five computers.)

How do they do this? The UK and US music publishing companies allege that it is illegal. AllOfMP3 contend that they comply with all Russian laws (and the local authorities seem to agree).

The BPI is taking it to court to find out:

UK music biz wins right to sue AllofMP3 here | Reg Hardware

My take is that it probably is illegal. Anything that is too good to be true generally is. However I suspect most people are not naive enough to think it is 100% legit. So, given that it’s illegal, why are people willing to pay for the service if they can get the same songs from your common-or-garden P2P network?

It has to be convenience.

In the UK AllOfMP3 is the second most popular download service after iTunes. They are clearly doing something right and maybe record companies should be trying to find what the secret sauce is rather than trying to shut them down. Is it not in their favour for more people to buy more songs?

Opinion

Nostalgia

I though I’d start the new year with an unusual, for me at least, positive message. The message: we’ve never had it so good technology-wise and often we forget that.

I started thinking about this when I realised what I was doing with my computer. Right now, for example, I am typing this into Emacs. In the back-ground I am scanning in some film and burning the previous scans onto CD. Only a few years ago any one of these activities would have been more than enough for a simple home computer. A joke at the time was that Emacs stood for “eight megabytes and continually swapping,” and now my iPod has thirty-two megs of memory as a convenience, basically to avoid letting the battery run down too quickly.

Even better, for the sake of clarity I’ve missed out the programs that I’m not actively using. Mail and Adium are happily keeping a look-out for new messages, iTunes is bashing out some good music. iCal is ready to tell me that I was supposed to be meeting a friend an hour ago, I left the Address Book open last time I looked up a phone number, I can’t even remember what I was editing in Word but that’s open too and Safari is primed, just in case.

But even that is a simplification. The disc image that’s being burned is on a different computer, they’re connected wirelessly and using a protocol that’s native to neither (Mac to Linux using SMB).

I don’t mention any of this to brag, or suggest that I’m doing anything odd or unusual here, quite the contrary. I just mean to point out that these are complex but every day activities that we expect not only to work, but to work seamlessly at the same time as lots of other stuff. And that, frankly, is absolutely amazing.