Been round the block

Jonh Ingham tells a fascinating tale of how he bonded his house to secure bail for Sid Vicious in the 1970's. Talk about being part of the 'in' crowd.

Have a look at the Rock Shrine series of posts on the same site if you need some help remembering what the classic 60's & 70's English rock scene was like.

It would be cool if

I could get the playlist of tracks I wanted to buy burnt onto a CD with a professionally printed label and package insert and posted to me.

While Cover Flow gives the illusion of the physicality of flipping through a stack of CD's, there is nothing like the real thing. I remember when the most popular way to get your musical fix was on 12" black plastic discs.

With all opinions about how we should get our music, we'd do well not to forget to enjoy our music.

Rob Fleming, Nick Hornby's anti-hero in High Fidelity says:

"Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Jonh Ingham has his stuffing on the inside

This just goes to show that years of listening to loud rock music doesn't scramble all of your brain cells. Jonh Ingham sums up his thoughts on some of the responses to Steve's call for DRM-free online music by asking:

"How many young people want to be like Steve Jobs and think that Apple is cool? How many want to be like Edgar Bronfman and dig Warners?"

Pretty succinct words with an obvious answer, I'd say.

In a related post Jonh goes over some of the numbers showing how only 3% of the music on iPods is bought from the iTunes Store, and alludes to something that must be giving Bronfman and the heads of the other big music studios sleepless nights. Despite being the undeniable giant of online music sales, Apple would probably sell near as dammit the same number of iPods if they shutdown the iTunes Store, as they do now.

The fact that iPods sells strongly in countries outside of the handful of North American, European and Australasian countries with access to the iTunes Store graphically illustrate that the labels need Steve (pbuh), Apple and the iPod a whole heap more than they are willing to acknowledge.

An uncomfortable truth

Music sales are declining, and growth in online music sales is not growing quickly enough to offset the contraction in sales of physical media. And predictably the heavies of the music industry still believe that beating up on the people who actually still buy music is somehow magically going to reverse this trend.

So I wasn't too surprised to read the dismissive and downright insulting responses to Steve's (pbuh) suggestion that getting rid of DRM on online music for sale would be good for business.

Making it easy for music buyers to download the songs they want, in the format they want and being able to load it onto the portable music player of their choice will lead to increased sales, not only online, but also from the local music store.
I don't think that it is a coincidence that Norah Jones and Lily Allen have had stellar performances in the online sales charts. I think that EMI releasing DRM-free singles from both artists did a lot to popularize their music. OK, maybe having catchy tunes and being drop-dead gorgeous may also have played a part, but not nearly as much as hassle free and cheap access to their music.

All those commentators ranting about how Steve (pbuh), and Apple, have some sort of ulterior motive for suggesting that DRM for online music be abandoned need only consider that a world with DRM-free online music exposes Apple to increased competition for both the iPod and the iTunes Store. Now why would Apple do that if it didn't see this as an opportunity for growth for the entire online music industry?

I think that John Gruber over at Daring Fireball sums it up nicely when he says that:

"People who are already buying from iTunes would continue to. People who refused to buy from iTunes because of DRM might start. And people who bootleg would continue to bootleg. This situation would be better for the music industry, not worse. The problem from the music industry’s perspective is their technically ludicrous pipe dream of devising a scheme that forces everyone to pay for every single song they play. They obsess over pirates while taking their honest customers for granted."

Wouldn't it be great if the music industry concentrated on delivering great content in the formats consumers want instead of dragging their customers off to court all the time?

UPDATE: Citing unnamed sources USA Today is reporting that EMI is engaged in talks with online music stores about selling its music without DRM. I hope that this is an accurate report because it could signal a new era for online music sales.
via The Apple Blog