Submitted: music subscription services will solve all the world's (DRM) problems

Great Debates
1

(I contemplated which forum this belongs in for a while and am more than happy to see it moved…)

The talk about EMI giving up DRM and all the related intricacies of the digital music business rekindles a feeling I’ve had for a while now that we’re on the verge of a total perfect solution to the question of media distribution: online subscription services + wireless portable broadband.

Let me say that I’m no fan of the commercial music industry and I think they have been amazingly short-sighted WRT the internet. However, I do believe that these companies, and indeed the artists themselves, have a legitimate problem as to how they will be fairly compensated with digital music distribution. As I see it, the main problem is the ability of people to download music, which can only be solved with the kinds of clunky and essentially limiting kluges that we call DRM.

The key advance of subscription music services is that downloads become obselete; service providers charge users for access, user listening patterns are tracked and tabulated, and media providers are compensated accordingly. The catch right now is that lots of people aren’t chained to an ethernet port all day (lucky bastards) and want their media to be portable. Wireless broadband will soon be ubiquitous -> bye-bye problem, welcome to the ‘celestial jukebox’ – anything ever recorded available at any time anywhere. Even better, we enter the world of truly independent music production and distribution – it costs the subscription services next to nothing to host music on their site and they only pay if people listen, so the bar is basically on the floor for who can post their music.

Doesn’t this sound like a revolution waiting to happen?

2

The celestial jukebox is inevitable. It is the only logical outcome from combining ubiquitous cheap data storage with ubiquitous networking.

The only question is if the jukebox will be a black market system where nobody pays anything, or a legal system where people pay a nominal subscription fee and royalties are calculated by tracking usage.

Of course, the existance of a legal system won’t forestall the existance of a free black market system, just that the legal system must be cheap enough and convenient enough that for the vast majority of users it’s easier to pay for the content. If the legal system is too expensive and too inconvenient then the black market system takes over.

Since I think compensating music creators in some way advances the useful arts and sciences I’m in favor of creating the legal system. But copyrights and intellectual property laws aren’t facts of nature, they are legal agreements designed to achieve a social good, namely the advancement of the useful arts and sciences. If, given changed technology, copyright law tends to discourage the useful arts and sciences, then the law should be changed.

3

Canada has a current system that is somewhat similar to what you are proposing. We pay a fee on most recordable media that goes to the recording industry. This fee is an acknowledgment that some of the recordable media will be used to back up music and make mixed tapes. It has generated hundreds of millions in revenues. Nice work if you can get it. Of course people who buy recordable media with no intention of recording music are not very happy with the fee.

The music industry lobbied hard to get this fee before downloading music had become common. Now they hate it. Once you have paid for the right to back-up and download music for back-up, the music industry can’t turn around and sue you for downloading music. They are trying to get these laws changed.

My take is that a subscription service is inevitable and a fair way to compensate artists. I’m not sure we will need the music industry as middle men, though.

4

It seems to me that a subscription service renders the copyright obselete; users won’t be able to, or need to, copy anything.

Nor do I see a black market being much of a threat, as no black marketeer, using his own library of copied mp's, could come anywhere close to the offerings of an above-board service that has access to some isolated and totally comprehensive database. And the legal providers could also keep people from looking to the black market by the services and tools they offer, something that’s working for iTunes et al. even in this barbaric age of ‘downloading’ (“what’s that?”, I hear my kid asking).

The only real risk I see is someone hacking into the BIG server where the celestial jukebox lives, but I don’t see a lot of banks having this problem despite the much greater potential reward to the hacker, so it seems like cryptologists have worked things out.

5

Well, what I’m envisioning isn’t so much people making MONEY with a black market version of the jukebox. Just that eventually everything ever recorded will be on multiple servers everywhere, and with openGoogle v7.2 it will be trivial to connect to an instance of any song somewhere on the internet and play it whenever you like, and even set up playlists for songs you don’t have saved locally…just instructions to search the intarweb for the song and stream it when it comes up in rotation.

We could easily have such a system now, this is only a little bit more complex than what Napster used to be, only instead of downloading music from another hard drive you’re streaming it. Except from a copyright point of view, downloading and streaming are the same thing. But for a celestial jukebox you won’t have room on your local machines for more than a small fraction of every recording ever made. There never will be a BIG server that holds everything, any more than there’s one big server that holds the internet. Bands will host their own music on their own servers, fans of bands or genres will host music, institutions like the Library of Congress will host the Alan Lomax style archival stuff, music companies will host music they are promoting. Like you said, it doesn’t matter where on the internet this stuff is “copied”, it just matters that you can access anything seamlessly at any time.

6

While I realize that the ‘server’ will be a distributed entity, I don’t think that it can’t be firewalled and access limited to legal portals. Again, banks, airlines, other agencies where the incentive for badness is much higher seem to be able to keep track of a crapload of information while quite effectively limiting access to this data. What that means is that individuals could never extract the information and store it locally, thereby preventing the formation of a black-market network.

7

How so? Anything I can hear, I can record, even if I have to resort to old-fashioned analog methods.

8

Fair enough, but I don’t think that getting a digital-to-analog-to-digital bootleg (using a cruddy, user-hostile interface) of a perfect digital original would motivate many people to save that $10/month.

9

Exactly, if there’s a legal version of the jukebox that only costs $10 a month, only a very few will bother with hunting down pirated music.

As for hacking into the database and copying it, that’s not what I’m imagining. There won’t be a single database that holds all the world’s music, protected by tight security. There will be millions of databases protected by very loose security, just tight enough that it’s a pain in the ass to circumvent it. The problem is that there is so much music released on non-DRM protected formats. I’ve ripped hundreds of CDs I own to mp3 so I can listen to them more easily. Every CD ever released is a music database, just not one that’s accessable online. Anytime anyone listens to anything, they make a local copy on their hard-drive, it is trivial to archive it and play it back later.

So you won’t be paying $10/month for the content…you’re paying $10/month for an easy to use interface that works seamlessly. People who don’t want to pay $10/month will be able to get whatever music they like, but it will be a pain in the ass, they’ll have to actually download the music they like, they’ll have to wait hours–maybe days!–before they can hear the latest releases, they’ll have to spend a little bit of time covering their tracks, they’ll know the band they’re big fans of isn’t being compensated and so be a bit ashamed, and so forth. It will be a minor inconvenience to have to dig up “free” music, and that inconvenience will (for the paid scheme to work) be worth more than $10/month.

And the whole point is that you throw out DRM, and throw out the whole concept of preventing copying, you don’t care if people “copy” music locally, or what hard drive a file is located on. It won’t matter, what matters is that you pay a certain amount to the royalty fund, and this money is divvied up according to some formula based on usage tracking among music creators. So every time someone plays “Yesterday”, Paul McCartney gets $0.001. After a million plays, Sir Paul has racked up $100,000. It doesn’t matter where that track was copied to, or what player was used to play the track. No one will care that their music player keeps track of what they listen to and sends a list back to the royalty fund, because it doesn’t matter to the individual listener, they have no incentive to keep it secret. So it doesn’t matter if you listen to “Yesterday” streamed from a server, or if you listen to “Yesterday” from a copy on your hard drive, or from a CD player, Paul gets paid that tiny amount either way.

The only downside is manipulation of the numbers…Paul McCartney can set up a server farm that plays a million copies of “Yesterday” every 3 minutes. But I doubt this would be cost effective, because spoofing this way would cost money for the hardware.

10

Yes, I like this maximally-distributed approach, although the mechanism for keeping tabs on all the various routes to get to a file seems like it would be have to be enormously complicated…

Still, I do think it’s possible to have an information infrastructure that is very large and distributed and yet tightly firewalled. There would certainly be a parallel, unsecured underground network, but as you say its disadvantages would be vast, and in my view it would be easy to keep it from growing because there would be no way to transfer data across the firewall. I’m no tech expert, but I think the technology exists to allow a user to play media using a remote client without giving that user any access to the primary data.

11

People will still have an incentive to keep things secret, even beyond the data manipulation for profit angle (which would be a very big issue for this kind of system).

For one, if they can manage to keep secret the fact that they’re playing any music at all, then they won’t have to pay a fee (or will pay less of one).

There is an incentive to keeping one’s privacy in and of itself, especially if one is listening to potentially questionable media.

12

Currently there are five services at about the price you are talking about. Yahoo, AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo. What is wrong with them?

13

I don’t know about others’ reasons, but:

  1. They won’t work with my iPod
  2. The sound quality sucks (I’ve only tried Rhapsody. Maybe the others are better)
  3. Hi, Opal.
14

It should be possible to keep usage stats anonymous; the service provider needs to know what gets listened to and how often, but they don’t need to know who did it. Sure, they COULD get that information, but that’s a risk you take every time you do anything over the internet.

15

Short-term problem; ubiquitous wireless broadband will soon solve it (and of course, portable players will have to be equipped with antennas).

I have a decent audiophile-grade stereo system at home. A blind listening comparison between my CD player and Rhapsody over my Mac proved them to be indistinguishable. Try the same thing yourself.

16

I don’t think that wireless will ever be so ubiquitous and so tied together that you will be able to roam from say your car driving to the airport and then onto the plane without having the music stop as you are handed off from one system to the next. Then there is the question of battery life. You will always have much better battery life if you don’t have to run the radio while listening to music. In short mp3 players with local storage will always be desired

17

Maybe this celestial jukebox could be provided free of charge. Just insert advertisements between songs and bingo…wait a second, hasn’t someone else already thought of this?

Only half joking here. I’d be willing to listen to some advertisement in order to obtain a “free” celestial jukebox.

Marc

18

Sure, your players will have local storage. I have an mp3 player with just 1 gig of flash memory that can store more than 200 mp3 quality songs. And this is only going to get cheaper and smaller. So lots of buffering can go on even if you don’t store most of your music on the player. You queue up a playlist or a “radio station” or some music selection algorithm like Pandora.com, the player goes out and grabs the next hour+ worth of play in advance and keeps downloading into the buffer and deleting already played tracks. With just a few gigs of flash memory you’ve got more than a day’s worth of music that can be stored locally, so unless you’re going hiking in the Brooks Range you don’t need a player that can store more.

As for why current music services aren’t what I’m looking for, well, can they play any song ever recorded any time I like as many times as I like whenever I like wherever I like on whatever player I like? That’s the celestial jukebox. A system that frees us from lugging around local copies of music on CDs or hard drives, and allows us to listen to whatever you want. Everything ever recorded at your fingertips, just as if you had a gigantic jukebox that contained every CD in existance and could play anything you like at the touch of a button.

Such a system is technologically possible today, it’s just not legally or economically possible. Of course, if we want new recorded music we’re going to have to pay for it some way, unless we expect future musicians to record for free on the weekends. But today’s musicians only get a very small fraction of the retail price of a CD. A different system could potentially give much much more money to musicians at a much lower cost to consumers and give consumers an astronomically increased amount of choice. If “content providers” can’t get it together to provide a legal paid version of the system, an illegal free version of the system will inevitably spring up, with the disadvantage that artists don’t get paid and the system will be a lot more buggy.

19

Ugh…not me!!

20

I will. Why pay $120 a year if it’s available cheaper elsewhere?

Most of the music in my collection is not available on ANY legal online service, although that could change. I imagine there will always be SOME music that is never posted online due to perceived lack of interest or ownership/copyright concerns.