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iTunes and Restrictive DRM
By Jacob Cohen | February 16, 2007
I listen to my music at work. Typically this means I have my iPod connected to my work laptop via a USB cable, and I use iTunes to listen to the music on it. For listening to my own music, this works great.
I also connect to other shared music libraries for variety, and listen to the music of other people on the network. It is this use case that I find less than ideal in many situations.
For example, if I am listening to someone’s library and I like a song or an artist, there’s no way for me to bookmark this to remember it later. About the only thing I can do is go into my iTunes account and add it to my shopping cart. I don’t want to buy it while I’m on my work computer, because I keep all my purchased music organized at home, and iTunes doesn’t let you redownload the file to a different computer.
This is a huge WTF. The purchased music already contains DRM that limits which computers the songs can be played on. Why do they force me to manually move files around? You can’t even copy stuff off of an iPod onto your computer, even if it’s your song that you paid for, and the computer you want to copy it to is licensed to play your songs in your iTunes account.
Next, I wanted to show a co-worker some of my songs, because it turns out we have similar taste in music. I can’t share the iPod, of course, because iTunes prevents you from doing that, too. I thought, “well, I’ll take some of the songs and make a playlist out of them, then publish that as an iMix, and he can listen to the 30-second previews of the songs at least.” But iTunes interfered again, saying “Ah ah ah… you can’t do that, you can only publish a playlist as an iMix if it’s a local playlist in your iTunes library. But you can’t copy your songs off the iPod to createa local library. In other words, the only way your co-worker is going to hear these songs is if you tell him the song names one by one and he uses the iTunes store to search for them.”
This is another WTF. You’d think Apple would want people to be exposed to more music, and to give them an easy way to remember to buy it later.. but in both cases, they seem overly concerned with preventing anyone but you from hearing your DRM-controlled music. I think Microsoft gets it a little better in this case. From what I hear, the Zune lets you listen to someone else’s song up to three times before you have to buy it. They definitely understand that while musical taste is personal, there are definitely benefits to being able to share songs with people, even on a temporary basis.
So come on, Apple. Let my share my iPod on the network. Let my publish the playlists on my iPod as iMixes. Even if you limit people to listening to the 30-second preview of the song, it would be a better experience than what exists now.
Topics: Tech |
February 24th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Rockbox? That my answer to iTunes annoyances