Comment of the Week

We love it when you leave a comment on our posts. No really, we do - it takes this blogging thing into a different dimension when we have some interaction with the people who read our thoughts.

We get some brilliant comments here, so we thought it would be cool to have a Comment of the Week, as an occasional feature. We'll run this when we think it's justified - not necessarily automatically every week - but then we think there's something worthy of your attention in case you missed it.

The rules (as Butch Cassidy said) is that there are no rules. We'll just post stuff which catches our eye. You don't have to agree with us or write a 500 word essay.

No prizes, just a little whuffie.

First winner is Mike Rhee, who posted this about Carlo's widely quoted post Why DRM will Kill Mobile Music:

Carlo-
I think some of your points invalidating DRM are true. Currently, it's mostly used as a tool for exclusivity in both software and hardware, limiting the user's ability to use music freely. But the problem is no different than the evolution of the phonograph to the cassette or the cassette to the CD.

As we all move towards a physically intangible digital medium of music, each of our personal collections are going to be slowly decimated. We have to deal with that. I know some people who are still "getting around" to converting their LP collections. Sometimes it's hard to let go, I know. As far as DRM goes, it's still a technology in it's early phases. Eventually the choices will narrow down, by nature of the market. We'll have to see if the best technology prevails.

I think your overall argument that DRM is choking the future of digital music is flawed, primarily because it's grounded in the now fading era of the LP. A record used to be something you owned, could physically touch, and look at, unfold. The idea of the album as a physical entity is dying. But with that, we enter a realm of access to music that's unlimited, instant, and unbounded by physical or temporal limitations.

Take the digital rental music service paradigms that are out there now; Rhaphsody, Yahoo, Napster. These services take the ownership element out of music, an element that didn't belong in the art form anyway. I think people shirk from the idea of renting music because we lose the tangible element. Even psychologically, it's kind of weird. At least with an iTunes purchase we can rest assured the songs will be there for as long as we maintain the file on some storage medium.

Using digital music is going to require a shift in mindset for all of us who grew up buying CD's and leafing through the booklets while it spun in our players. But the idea of sharing music as a digital community, constantly circulating new songs that link to other new songs, passing over one album to the next, finding new artists, all without the constrictions of availability or individually purchasing each record, is a fascinating idea. This Utopian music fantasy is a ways off, I know. But if this is where music is heading, it's going to be an exciting place.

Comments

[Shannon J Hager]

I was a Rhapsody subscriber for a couple years and am now a Yahoo Music Unlimited subscriber, and I don't want to imagine not having these services. Especially now that I can sync to the 1GB card on my Audiovox SMT 5600.

I listen to too many songs to be able to afford to pay by the tune. Most people do the same (who wants to buy every song they like on the radio?) but don't realize it because we are so used to an "ownership" frame of mind.

The thing that nobody really wants to admit is that music, for the most part, is disposable and the media we download/buy now is not permanent. Many people say "but I want to own the music I listen to", but fail to realize they don't really want to own all of the songs they like and that the mp3/wmv/aac files they buy now are no more permanent than the cassette singles from a decade ago, the 45s from 20 years ago, the 8-tracks, the LPs, or any of the other forms of music we have all bought. We thought those were permanent, too, but where are they now? I have bought Jane's Addiction "Ritual De Lo Habitual" at least 4 times and was happy surprised a few months ago when I discovered I still have 1 copy of it.

I won't listen to Beyonce's new CD again, but I listen to it in full on Rhapsody. Not 30-second samples, the full CD in the order it was meant to be heard. I didn't like more than 1 or 2 songs. I would have never heard any of them if I had to pay per tune. And I would not have been able to make the educated decision of whether I wanted to hear the full CD.

While I'm ranting and rambling, one last point:
Radio music is so bad these days because of the extremely short playlists. Why are the playlists so short? Because radio is an on-demand medium. People tune to a station because they know what they will hear. They don't know the exact song and time, but they know within an hour or so. But true on-demand isn't possible on today's airwaves.

Thank goodness that $6 a month will buy me true on-demand, along with recommedations and more radio stations than I could ever listen to.

I still buy CDs but most of my time is spent listening to music on my mobile or streaming on my desktop. These new subscription services have given my love of music a new life. I have never been as excited about music since the days I spent all of my lunch money on used tapes at Repo Records. Except now I get more, better music, and can still afford to eat.