DRM

Digital Rights Management

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

when steve jobs released his "thoughts on music" letter on February 6, 2007, the effect rippled throughout the matrix. the wall was DRM and the soviets were the big four.

a few were suspect, of Jobs; his motivations, his honesty: and were big enough to say so.

then yesterday, the big news came. DRM is coming off EMI's music sold on iTunes. more ripples. greater amplitude. a new dawn.

since then, the naysayers have been equally big enough to recant.

my opinion: steve jobs has single handedly saved music (the artform) with iTunes (and maybe the iPod). and now again by throwing off DRM.

humanity thanks you mr. jobs.


p.s. i can't help thinking though - given Vista's investment in DRM (It's very consumer-hostile technology that is being deployed) where does that leave microsoft? the uh, axis of evil? j/k!

greed in the music industry

if ever redundancies were present in just five words - "greed in the music industry" would rate among the worst offenders.

last friday we had some of our friends over for dinner - folks I first partied with at their flat in Cairo and road tripped with to Sharm - and, I again had a chance to do the mac/technology-vulcan-mind-meld with my buddy Jeson. He gave me the heads up about a number of things that solve problems we have; including secure notepad widget, cool stuff from rogue amoeba, an easy network backup utility, and the fact that you can apparently plug external (e.g. firewire) USB2 hard drives directly into an airport express (in addition to printers) - which then automatically mount as a network hard drive any time you are on your network.

he also turned me on to the beauties of genetic algorithms to create dynamic customizable playlists in internet radio... i.e. pandora. just this week i started listening at work... and it's been nearly magical. type in BT - and all kinds of non-BT stuff that, I find I am digging - but wouldn't necessarily have discovered on my own - are floating to the surface. I see that I need to be checking out William Orbit... probably no surprise there - besides the fact that I am a huge fan of "ray of light" - clearly, however, I need to start the music library on growth hormones again.

then - i pop over to pandora's blog - and see the writing is already on the wall for internet radio... with the war coming from the guys who stand to gain the most from pandora's brilliant take at it.

amazon's long tail and the ability to buy the song of your choice instead of the whole album on iTunes have created the brightest hope for music as well as the industry - yet these bozo's keep thinking they benefit by telling us what to listen to (via universal FM radio programming in the US) and whenever they can constrict our exposure to new, other and different music.

bastards.