I just read Kevin's article about how hopeless DRM currently is and how it relates to Apple's (fairly strongly) rumored upcoming iTunes-integrated downloadable music service (probably to be announced on Monday), and between that and the subsequent conversation I had with Kevin, I got to thinking about what features the Ideal Downloadable Music Service (hereafter referred to as IDMS) would offer.
I was an emusic subscriber for awhile, and contrasting my emusic experience with what I expect from Apple's upcoming service offers a couple of significant insights into what the IDMS would offer.
The first thing a downloadable music service needs is music to let people download, and while emusic obviously had some music, in the end their song selection was just not enough. Sure, there was still a lot of music there, and I downloaded a lot from them while I had my subscription, but even more of what I wanted was not there, and that's why I ultimately cancelled my subscription. This issue will be addressed immediately by Apple's service, because the rumor claims that they've gotten all five major record labels to agree to make their music available through the service.
The IDMS would, of course, have as many songs available as possible, if not every song, ever.
But just because it has every song ever doesn't mean that the system is going to be useful. No, the system is also going to need to be easy to use. Here, I'm going to draw on both my experiences using emusic and my experiences with peer to peer file sharing programs.
With P2P, there's a lot of wasted time involved. First I have to find someone who's offering the song I want at a decent quality, and I have to hope they don't go offline before I finish downloading it. And of course, this doesn't even get into the issues of trying to find entire albums -- First you have to find a track listing for the album so you know what you're looking for, and then you have to start looking for all of those tracks, and you usually end up getting them from different hosts so the quality and consistency of the files can be all over the board. And neurotic as I am, I always end up going and immediately listening to the songs when I download them, to make sure there aren't any problems with the rip. And don't even get me started on mislabeled songs...
Basically, once you add the "time is money" factor to the P2P equation, the music you're getting isn't actually free. And the frustration involved in using P2P will probably cut years off your life.
On the other hand, there was emusic. If they had the music, they always had the full album, and there were never any flaws in the files, but all the files were only encoded 128kpbs. The big problem was that the default interface of having to download these files with a web browser was very tedious, and even with a third party tool to help me download whole albums, it was still a time consuming multi-step process to go from finding the songs to downloading them to putting them into my music library. Considering I was already paying for the service, the additional time is money factors left me even more irritated with the process.
In contrast to both those, the IDMS needs to seamlessly integrate into your music listening flow, allowing you to easily and reliably find and download high quality music (as individual songs or complete albums) directly into your music library. The only way a pay to download service is going to be successful here is by making it so much easier and so much more reliable than the other options that it will win users by allowing them to immediately purchase, download, and listen to what they want, without wasting any time with the problems of P2P systems that I described above. I expect Apple's upcoming service will meet most of these criteria fairly well.
So far the IDMS has every song ever, and it's a one click operation. But if every song cost $2, who would use it? So, the IDMS is going to need to be sufficiently cheap per song to entice listeners to purchase more songs than they otherwise would, allowing the IDMS and the record labels to make money through bulk sales. Because each additional song sold only costs the IDMS a miniscule amount in bandwidth, the more they sell the better. This point is all about bulk bulk bulk. Heck, it'd be nice to entice people with an unlimited download subscription option. And I think I'd actually be upset if buying the entire album wasn't cheaper than buying individual songs. And on this point, I have no idea what to expect from Apple's service, but more than a dollar per song is completely unreasonable, and even a dollar per song is way too much in my opinion.
Before I go on, let me share a couple of quick anecdotes about my experiences with the three primary forms of music distribution I've been dealing with lately:
I still buy a moderate number of CDs, and the first and last thing I do with a new CD is rip it before tossing it onto the shelf. Of course, sometimes I have to go rerip the CD when something goes funny, but the big problem is if I lose the CD and lose the mp3s, then I've lost the music and would have to buy a new copy of the CD. Or if I lose the CD and some fantastic new digital music technology comes along, I'd have to buy the CD again and rerip it into the new format. Bah and Bah.
With P2P, if I lose the files, then I'm going to have to go through the frustrating process of finding them again. Blah and blah.
And perhaps worst of all in this arena is emusic: My subscription allowed me to download unlimited music for $10 a month, but since I've cancelled my subscription, I can now no longer redownload the songs I've previously downloaded. This is worse than you think, because before I subscribed, I bought a few TMBG albums from them individually, and though I paid for those independently of my subscription, I now no longer have access to those files if I somehow lose the mp3s. I've written them a few angry emails about this, but with no luck. Boo and boo.
So, while what I described above is a downloadable music service that I'd probably use, it's still not the IDMS. In particular, here's the killer feature that would put the I in the IDMS:
Once I've bought a song using the IDMS, I should be able to download it as many times as I want. Now, you might think this is obvious, but first of all, note that I emphasized the word "song," and second of all, the possibilities for this are pretty amazing.
Remember above when I mentioned having to rerip CDs if a better music technology became available? Imagine just being able to download a smaller, better sounding copy of a song you already bought instead. Heck, have the IDMS notify you about this if you want. (Though it'd kinda suck if the new technology had some foul DRM in it, but we'll hope for the best)
The emphasis on this feature is that the user buys the right to download that song as many times as he wants, and not just the right to download that particular copy of that song.
Imagine being able to walk into an Apple Store or Apple Cybercafe with just your iPod, sitting down, logging in with your .mac account, plugging in your iPod, and downloading and putting some different music you own on your iPod.
Imagine being at a friend's and saying "dude, you have to hear this song... hold on, just let me download it from my library... I already bought it."
Imagine promotions based on songs you've already bought -- free remixes, etc.
The trick is, the features of the IDMS would be so useful and the price for songs so cheap, that DRM won't ever even be necessary. People will want to pay to use the service because of the advantages it offers in their music listening lifestyle. I actually believe that people would prefer to just use the IDMS than to mess with trying to find songs via P2P programs. If built correctly, the long term benefits of the IDMS would outweigh the short term advantage of the "free" aspect of the P2P system. Not only that, but the IDMS would be better in the short term in a lot of ways, as described above.
Of course, the IDMS has a lot of room to be evil, too, so here are a few of the gotchas to possibly look out for:
- Forcing users to upgrade their songs when a new technology comes along that has "better" DRM protection.
- Selling user's purchasing patterns to marketers. While this has always been a danger with online shopping (and credit cards, etc), this would be more problematic in this case because the IDMS would have easy access to all of your music purchasing history.
- As soon as your music library is hooking into the net, the possibility of having the IDMS client detect "possibly illegal" songs in your library gets kind of scary.
- Some way for the IDMS to "revoke" a song you purchased would be very unhappy.
- And on.
As absurd as it sounds, if a service came out that had the features of the IDMS I described, it very well might convince me to buy music I've already bought, because it'd be the last time I'd have to buy it. I'd happily pay for the peace of mind in knowing that if my laptop were destroyed, it would be a trivial matter to rebuild my music library the next morning, rather than a painstaking process that'd take weeks or even months, and who knows how much money. (If you think that sounds strange, just remember how many albums you owned on both vinyl and tape or tape and CD, or even all three).
Of course, some of this is probably a pipe dream, but a boy can look at the stars, can't he? For now, we'll just have to wait and see what Apple actually offers.