Roxio Labs

I'm a modern kind of guy. I have a TiVo. I've burned a DVD. I sometimes even upload photos to my MySpace page when the boss is out of the office. But my friend Bruce was shocked the other day when I told him something that made him choke a little on his Yorkshire tea. We were discussing music downloads and I dropped the bombshell that... I'd recently given up downloading music off the internet. Yes, as ashamed as I am of my technophobic aversion to getting screwed over by the music companies, I feel like I have good reasoning...

I first got into downloading tracks for money with Windows Media Player 9. I'm a PC user, don't own a Mac (not at home at least) and, at the time, the choice of different stores available in WMP was pretty attractive to me. If one store didn't have what I wanted, I could go to another and (sometimes) find it there. So for a few years, I made a sort of committment to WMP and it's collection of music stores. Along I went on my merry way, buying up all the albums I'd never gotten around to owning in my youth. As a single guy with no dependents, I spent a sizable part of my disposable income on music downloads. I probably bought at least 150 albums over the course of a couple of years and built up a large music collection, helped along by the clever "these people also bought..." recommendation engine - the sole purpose of which is to make me buy more stuff than I otherwise would. So, what to do with all that music... play it back, right? Right?

The problems started when I wanted to do anything vaguely interesting with my music - like play it in my car, or move it to another PC. Or copy it to my MP3 player (yes, i'm the only person in the world who bought an iPod "alternative"). Slowly but surely, I discovered that most of my woes were caused by DRM - Digital Rights Management. Tracks I'd bought on Napster would require "authorization" to play back - which would really screw up the auto-playlist feature on my Windows MCE system. I couldn't switch to iTunes - uh, all the CDs I'd ripped and all the music I'd bought on my Windows system were in WMA format - not compatible with iTunes or iPods. Then I heard about the Zune player. "Hooray," I thought. "Problem solved". Then I woke up - nothing I'd bought in the past was going to be compatible with the new DRM format used by the otherwise interesting Zune player. So I couldn't play any of that stuff on a Zune without serious pain.

So, long story short: I gave up. I started buying real CDs again. I start ripping them to MP3 format, so they'd be pretty much guaranteed to play back on anything. And it sounds like Apple and EMI have pretty much come to the same conclusion I did - getting rid of DRM is absolutely the smartest thing that the rights owners can do to make people fall back in love with online music downloads. And Jobs has realized that people will actually PAY for the luxury of being able to do whatever they want with their music - just like they could in the good old days. $1.29 per track to have all my playback woes go away like magic? Sounds a little bit like a ransome demand, sure. But, frankly, I'm willing to I'll pony up to get back to that utopian paradise that saves me a trip to Walmart on a Saturday. I want my beautiful music back, safe and sound - and I want it NOW.

Full Apple/EMI DRM story here.