Hilary Rosen Asks Steve Jobs to "Let My Music Go"

I read the essay on Arianna Huffington's new celeb blog, and it just smacked of "boo hoo; I don't like how the game is turning out, so I want to change the rules."

Sounds like Hillary Rosen has an acute case of sour grapes to me.

I'm not quite sure what she's talking about--more than half of the current 1000 songs on my ipod are from free music download sites--these find themselves to my ipod via itunes with no problem. These tend to be more recent releases--I do understand that it can be frustrating to try to locate an oldie or rarity that hasn't yet been made available via itunes, but are there not software work-arounds to fix the compatability problem?

I currently don't have any portable MP3 player, but I may get one some day. One feature it must have is the ability for me to load ANYTHING into it, especially music that I've created in one of my bands. I will look very carefully at this before I purchase anything.

I am able to put any .MP3 file on my iPod ... thus it is technically feasible to put any song on the iPod. Am I missing something here?

Anonymous -

It's not the MP3 files she's complaining about, it's the fact that iPods won't work directly with DRM'd proprietary file formats, specifically Microsoft's.

I believe the argument can be explained as follows.

Apple was meant to establish a DRM method and the Music industry was meant to be able to license other companies similarly, on some weird assumption that the other companies would be able to use the same DRM. What happened though is that Apple's DRM is Apples DRM and the other potential companies either need to license through Apple or renegotiate ( apparently not a small task) with ARIA and other providers. Now this has caused instant fractioning of the industry with Sony DRM only working on Sony products and ditto for Apple, microsoft and others. As such the only media that is truly able to be purchased and used anywhere is DRM'less media or you are locked in to proprietary formats media and devices.

The problem from ARIA and major medias point of view is that as Apple is the leading media player seller by a large margin it has now become a defacto standard for DRM'ed media playing. Why go with anything else, when that other product has lower acceptance, less compatiability and less selection than the mass use Apple product. Of course the fact that Apple products still work with all the old and DRMless formats is just icing for them.

Of course the screw up actually belongs to ARIA if the wanted an open DRM format they should have developed and released it or purchased one and forced everyong to use that one as part of their licensing negotiations. But with heavyweights like MS, Sony and first deliverer Apple, negotiating they got lost. So now it's sour grapes and begging time, because all of a sudden Bands are starting to ask Apple for distribution before the traditional labels, due to the market dominance they are starting to develop.