Andrew Leonard makes some relevant statements about what’s wrong with all the different “legal” music services developing, and how, by not embracing the universal MP3 format that made Napster so damn great, they all kind of suck.

Musical snares
Is Apple’s iTunes service nirvana for music fans — or just the start of a file-format nightmare that will drive us all nuts?
By Andrew Leonard for Salon.

The quality of my life has improved. But iTunes for Windows is not perfect, and my music consumer utopia is still an unrealized dream. Despite its vaunted half a million songs, I want plenty of albums and acts that are not yet available. I am greedy. I want everything. Let me buy it now. I’m also not crazy about the iTunes library organizing software. But what alarms me the most is the flip side of Apple’s success — a looming battle over file formats that, at least in the short term, is going to force consumers to make hard choices.
Because iTunes won’t play my Windows Media music files. And the Windows Media Player won’t play songs purchased from the iTunes store.
That’s not the future I want to pay for. In the 21st century era of late capitalism, the consumer is supposed to be king — my every desire is supposed to be reflected by marketplace offerings. Instead, the market is ordering me to get Steve Jobs’ smirking grin tattooed on my butt, and while that may be an improvement on being branded with a Microsoft iron, I’d still rather keep my skin as it started, unblemished.
Right now, there are several options for compressing music files into sizes where it becomes feasible to download them online. Tunes purchased from the iTunes Music Store come in the AAC format. Tunes bought from most other commercial services have aligned themselves with Microsoft’s WMA format. Then there’s the original MP3 standard, which is aligned with no single company, and there’s even a free software alternative called Ogg Vorbis.
This is not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of the relative merits of the different formats. Suffice it to say that about a year ago I committed an egregious error. When I finally purchased my first computer with a CD burner, I was so excited about being able to make my own CD mixes that I unthinkingly went ahead and used the Windows Media Player to rip all my favorite CDs to my hard drive. The Windows Media Player allows users to encode their songs only in the WMA format, which (like iTunes’ AAC format) comes with various digital rights management capabilities built in.
Now I have all this music that iTunes won’t play, and a bunch of songs purchased from iTunes that the Media Player won’t play. So, at the moment, I am prevented from burning a CD that has songs from both libraries. There are converters available that will transform WMA files into AACs and eventually there will no doubt be converters that perform the reverse service, but the process is a hassle that may end up downgrading the overall sound quality. I would have been far better off if I had ripped all my CDs to MP3s to begin with, because iTunes and the iPod will play MP3s. (And even, better, the iTunes software will allow me to rip my CDs into MP3s.)
I should have known better, because now I’m sitting exactly where Microsoft wants me, facing a significant “switching cost” if I want to adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. It takes time to rip CDs — and I have a lot of ’em…
I have a friend who has about 30,000 songs on a hard drive. There’s nothing to stop me from hooking his computer to mine with a USB cable and slurping all that music at once. Sure it’s illegal, and I’m not going to do it, but the RIAA would never know if I did, unless I did something stupid and put that server online for everybody on the Net to grab.
All over the world, even as Hollywood tries to push copy-protection legislation and sue individual file traders, music lovers are accumulating larger and larger collections of songs on their hard drives. Eventually, we’ll be able to go to our local flea market, and the guy who right now is selling freshly burned copies of Eminem is going to be selling us DVDs with 4.8 gigabytes of music, also for a few bucks. Even worse, the swap meets will soon be featuring swappable drives that will contain everything the Beatles ever recorded, or all the pop music from the ’60s, or the entire Warner Bros. catalog. Cheap.
I don’t know how the record companies are going to stop it. I do know that if one day I’m staring at hundreds of gigabytes of music files on my own computer that I paid for that aren’t playable on the newest piece of hardware or best available piece of music software, I’m going to be sorely tempted to head down to the flea market. And even if I refrain, that doesn’t mean everybody else will.
Wouldn’t it just be better to give me what I want, right now? Please don’t make the consumer angry! Or he’ll bite.

Continue reading →