The PalmPre versus Apple iTunes Sync Fight is Confusing

According to today’s news, the PalmPre is once again able to sync directly with Apple’s iTunes.

This will last exactly as long as it takes for Apple to figure out how disable the feature and then PalmPre users will be temporarily blocked once again.

Now, I can see why Apple might have a lot of hate for the PalmPre.  It was developed almost completely by ex-Apple folk and was released in an attempt to be a direct competitor to the iPhone, though most critics agree it loses in any sort of head-to-head battle.

What I don’t understand is why Apple thinks blocking the PalmPre’s ability to sync to iTunes is a wise move. Sure, it takes away a capacity many people like in their media players but it also opens the door wide to competitors looking to give folks a reason to try something other than iTunes as a media manager.  People will only look for an alternative if they can’t get access to the original, popular and rather well made iTunes software.

Not only that, but this discourages PalmPre owners from purchasing any music via iTunes.  This is a direct loss of potential revenue and again offers a great opportunity for competitors to step in and offer an alternative.

Considering how much effort is going into blocking the PalmPre from syncing with iTunes, Apple clearly has  their reasons.  I just can’t seem to fathom those reasons.

Five Reasons Why Buying Music is Headed for the History Books

The collapse of the traditional music industry has been well documented.  The Virgin MegaStore just closed for good in Union Square and the Tower Records franchise that was once a vibrant hub for music is gone from the landscape.  The number of CDs sold is at an all-time low and I am willing to bet if you eliminated all sales of CDs to anyone over 30 the figures would be staggeringly low.

Sure, for the moment, there is still a brisk business in the sale of legal digital downloads.  iTunes and Amazon both seem to be making some reasonable coin on the practice.  Still, it is hard to imagine that this will last much longer.

Here are five reasons why buying music is headed for the history books:

1) The legacy of Napster – Napster, in its original incarnation, was our first taste of how easy, fun and beneficial it was to be able to share your entire music collection with other people all over the world and have the chance to share the music libraries of those very same folks.  Sure, the free aspect was cool, but the best part was the endless selection and immediate accessibility.  Napster taught us that music did not have to be locked down on physical formats or hidden behind DRM.

2) The Return of “Radio” – Sure, traditional, terrestrial radio may not be a threat to record sales, but the world of webcasters combined with the fact that all those traditional stations are available online means that there are an endless stream of free listening options that combine the ability to refine genres with the chance to discover new music.  From Pandora to Last.FM to the basic “radio” options embedded in iTunes, it’s easier than ever to simply tune in, sit back and enjoy.

3) The iPhone (and its brethren) – Nearly every major music webcaster now has an iPhone application that will stream content to you anywhere you can get a signal.  This is not limited to WiFi zones but most will deliver content of 3G and even Edge.  This means that unless you spend a lot of time underground (like I do in the NYC subways) you never have to disconnect from the flow.  Why cart around 10,000 songs when you can just press the Slacker icon and gain access to over 1,000,000 tunes.

4) Songza et. al. – For those not familiar with the site, Songza.com is a music search site that scours the web (mostly YouTube, actually) for recordings of any song or artist you enter into the search box.  This solves the, “I wanna hear the song right now” problem that you face with Pandora and the like.  Whether the major labels and RIAA like it, just about every song and artist I can come up with results in a successful search on Songza.  The point is, legal or otherwise, every song is out there somewhere already, making it tough to convince me why I should pay to buy it.

5) The Generation Gap – Try this: find any kid under the age of 15 and ask them what was the last album they bought.  Chances are, there is no last album.  In fact, studies in the UK have shown that kids are  buying less music online but they are not replacing that with some kind of piracy – they’re just not downloading music to “own” for free or for a fee.  What’s the point of buying music when it is already out there to be heard?

Michael Jackson SELLS 2.6 Million Digital Downloads

I’ve never really given much value to the absurd figures thrown around by the RIAA when it comes to revenue lost due to piracy.  Aside from being based on guesses and estimates, it always fails to take into account revenue generated due to the same piracy (increased sales for concerts, etc).

Most importantly, with iTunes going DRM-free and the general accessibility of legally accessible music on the rise, I just don’t believe that piracy is the real problem at all.

One good example of this is:

…based on preliminary sales numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, 2.6 million Michael Jackson (his work with Jackson 5 and the Jacksons included) digital downloads were sold in just one week.   LINK

Yup, even though Michael Jackson’s music is readily available on all the major torrent sites, it looks like most people just went ahead and paid to download the music.

Why? Well, first, they knew exactly what they were getting. Unlike trying out a new band and wishing you didn’t need to plunk down the better part of $20 just to check them out, everyone buying Michael Jackson tunes did so with full knowledge.  Second, they wanted it immediately and the truth is that, for the vast majority of computer users, the intricacies of bittorrent are just too complicated.

So, while I am sure plenty of people downloaded themselves some free Jackson this past week, it doesn’t look like they are going to bring down the whole system.

Napster, Reborn, Again, Tries the Subscription Plan

Napster holds a special place in internet history as one of the first sites to bring P2P file-sharing to the masses.  Napster is also often wrongly blamed for bring down the music industry.  Those of us with even a shred of intelligence understand that the music industry, or big labels to be more specific, brought themselves down with bad business practices that treated musicians as indentured servants and fans as potential criminals.

Anyhow, Napster was bought by BestBuy not too long ago and they have relaunched with a model that is growing in popularity:

…if you subscribe for a year and pay $60, you get a year’s subscription to a pretty decent on-demand music service. You also get access to 60 commercial-free internet radio stations and 1,400 “expertly programmed playlists.” And when you cancel the service, you’ll get to keep 60 songs… which probably would have cost you about $60 anyway if you’d purchased them from Amazon, iTunes, or another online music store. LINK

Of course, this isn’t anywhere close to the first subscription music service and right now it requires you to be at your computer and online to use the service – no portable device support as of yet.

The advantage of this service to something free like Slacker.com or Pandora.com is that it gives you the freedom to pick the exact songs you want to hear when you want to hear them.

Here are the issues that will effect the potential success or failure of the Napster plan:

1) Is $60/year a price the market will deem “fair” AND is it enough money for Napster to pay the rightsholders should users stream music at heavy rates?

2) Will the lack of portability make this a no-go from the get-go?

3) Can Napster supply a broad enough library of music to keep the audience happy?

4) With all the free options out there is this enough of a service to compete?

Is NYT’s Micki Maynard an Internet Scofflaw?

Gawker likes to post the tweets of various semi-known people for the edification of the masses.  One in particular just caught my eye.  It was posted by Micheline Maynard, New York Times Senior Business Correspondent in Detroit.

It read:

Listening to the new remixes of U2’s Magnificent on iTunes UK, since iTunes US doesn’t offer yet. Song already good, mixes spice it up.

I already wrote today about how absurd it is for companies to attempt to limit access to online content based on a user’s geography but it is interesting to note that the only way I know of that Maynard could have connected to iTunes UK is via a proxy server of some kind.  While not expressly illegal, it is certainly a step into grey-law.

It’s also a great example of why companies are wasting a lot of time and energy trying to limit access to content when they could be profiting and expanding by providing greater access to content.

Kindle Users Learn Difference Between Licensing and Ownership

In the simple days before the internet and digital technology the concept of buying a book was pretty simple.  You went to a bookstore and you gave the bookseller money and he or she gave you a stack of bound paper with words (and sometimes pictures) printed on the pages – a book, if you will.  Once the transaction was complete that book was yours forever.  You could resell it any price the market supported.  You could trade it or loan it or use it as toilet paper.  It didn’t matter.  The book was yours.

Unfortunately, as ArsTech points points out, in the current time of eBooks, the idea of buying a book is not quite so simple:

Amid the general love-fest over the Amazon Kindle, its DRM is beginning to bite some users in the butt as they are getting locked out of their accounts and, subsequently, their e-book purchases. The incidents highlight once again that the customer doesn’t really own the content when it comes to DRM; even when it’s so loose that it’s not apparent day to day, it can still hurt you in the long run.

Whether due to a change in “terms of service” or due to violating exisiting agreements, Kindle-owners have found themselves actually locked out of accessing books they had already purchased.  I like ArsTech’s metaphore:

A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn’t take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.

There is a reason that even iTunes has given up on most DRM for music and it won’t be all that long before book publishers will have to follow suit or find themselves fighting a similar losing battle against “pirates” who think it is unfair for a company to control access to content once the customer has completed their purchase of said content.

LINK

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Old Jews Telling Jokes and Now Making Deals

A few months ago a truly charming webseries launched called “Old Jews Telling Jokes.”  In an initial stroke of marketing genius, the series is exactly what the title promises:

Now comes word that the series is going out wide on home video:

First Run Features has picked up domestic home video rights to “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” a Web video series created and directed by Sam Hoffman from Jetpack Media, the Internet production company created by GreeneStreet Films.

“Jews” has registered more than 1.5 million video plays since the series launched Jan. 30. It also was a top 10 video podcast on iTunes for several weeks.

What I love most about this story is that it proves that anyone with a truly good idea and some authenticity can be recognized and rewarded all thanks to the incredible democratic powers of the internet.

Now, I’m not totally sure what home video rights are worth these days but considering that this series has such a broad potential audience of older folks it wouldn’t be surprising if First Look was able to turn a profit on DVDs.

LINK

Time Warner Cable Bandwidth Caps Cause Concern

There are lots of reports today about Time Warner Cable’s testing of a new bandwidth-usage caps that would basically charge you more if you transferred more data online.  This is not limited to strictly downloading but includes streaming, an increasingly popular use of bandwidth.

SAI breaks it down:

What does this mean for you? If you watch about 7 hours a week of standard-def video, or 2.5 hours a week of hi-def Web video, you could easily pass even the 40 GB cap. After that, each iTunes movie rental — or Netflix (NFLX) stream, or whatever — could cost $1 to $4 more. Or Hulu episodes could cost $0.30 to $0.50. That doesn’t even include your other Web usage, such as downloading music, using the Web, etc.

On one hand, there is some logic in a plan that charges heavy users more than light users but it doesn’t seem an especially wise or sustainable plan by TWC.

First, as long as there are other bandwidth providers out there offering unlimited usage, TWC will have time keeping customers signed up.  Second, the rate at which our usage of bandwidth is increasing, often just from month to month, is amazing.  What might seem like reasonable usage today, watching lower-res videos, climbs quickly when one discovers HD streams and the like.

If TWC is your only option for highspeed service, you might be screwed but this kind of action will open up a lot of reasons for competitors to step in with a better offer.

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Wired Aids and Abets Piracy

Here is what makes the whole DRM issue so absurd.  All these companies claim that, for one weak reason or another, they “need” DRM to protect their property.  The problem is that DRM simply doesn’t do anything to stop people from copying the content and moving it to other formats.

In addition, it seems that nobody minds breaking the terms of service, and maybe even the law, to remove the DRM from products that they have bought.  Case in point is this recent article in Wired magazine that details how to make DVD from movies you’ve bought via iTunes.  Just remember:

Because movies and TV shows purchased from iTunes store have DRM copy-protection, you have to remove the DRM protection before burning them to DVDs for playback on your home DVD player.

Now, here’s the kicker.  Nowhere in this well-written and easy-to-follow how-to article is there any mention that there is anything wrong with stripping off the DRM that was included, one assumes, as a way to stop users from doing exactly what this article demonstrates.

Is this an case of Wired giving out detailed information on how to break the law or is it simply more proof that DRM is a broken system that should be retired poste-haste?

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Two Great Examples of Free Content Boosting Bottomline

Two stories caught my attention, both of which add evidence to the idea that giving your content away for free can actually increase your overall potential for montization – or as I like to say, Cashification.

First, Mashable has some follow-up to Monty Python’s innovative approach to combatting pirated clips on YouTube – they made their own YouTube channel where they posted everything they’d ever done for free.  They also provided links to the actual DVDs and CDs for sales at Amazon and iTunes.  Can you guess what happened next?

Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Still not convinced.  How about this from TechDirt in their story about idpendent musician Coery Smith, who both offers his music for download free on his own site and for money via iTunes:

However, as an experiment, they took down the free tracks from Corey’s website for a period of time last summer… and sales on iTunes went down. Once again, this proves how ridiculous the claim is that free songs somehow cannibalize sales.

The fact that there are so many stories like these makes it ever more difficult to accept the current business practices of the major music labels and studios.  While they spend more time and money on hunting down and prosecuting their one-time customers their current customers are running our of patience and will jump ship, too.

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