Steve Jobs and EMI Press Conference - No More DRM?

[JNB]

That's why I never bought singles.....but no seriously 1 dollar is way to expensive for 1 lousy song..when cd's were around you didn't pay $1 for a song...1 dollar a song is a rip off

No, when CD's were introduced, $25 was the average, everyday, typical price for one (well, ok, $24.98). For twelve songs. So, you're right, you didn't pay a dollar a song, you paid two dollars a song.

Let's see, in 1967, when the Beatles released Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, the average album cost $4.99 (that's what I paid at my local record shop in East LA). That's for 12 songs on the average album (unless it was Tull, then you got one song). That's, um, lessee, carry the one... um, $.42 a song.

Now obviously, a buck then and a buck now aren't the same, so to keep pace with the REAL cost of things, that forty-two cent song would cost - today - $2.16. Sounds like things have actually gotten less expensive...

I really don't want to sound like I'm busting your chops, but exactly how is a measly dollar a ripoff? In what socioeconomic theory does the value of a song that you can possess for the remainder of your life not achieve eight bits?

 

[EricNau]

Thankyou captain obvious, but 1 dollar is still to much for a song considering I payed less than that per song when I bought the eminem show for 17 dollars way back in the day and I got a cd, cd case and a booklet.

You bought the Eminem Show album for $17. That album has 20 songs. That's 85 cents per song.

Currently, iTunes is selling that album for $9.99 (that's $7 less than you paid). The iTunes version still has 20 songs. That's only 50 cents per song.

Still think iTunes is too expensive?

 

[synth3tik]

There is an audio webcast.

http://www.emigroup.com/Default.htm

It starts at 1PM London time and 8AM NYC time.

mods can you put that in the header post?

Cool thanks for the info. I get home from work at 7AM Minneapolis time, so this will be perfect.

 

[inkswamp]

As for the Beatles. Overhyped group IMHO. Yes they have SOME good music (compared to the one hit wonders of today.) but I throw the Beatles in with Elvis overall. They both have good stuff however its nothing to wet yourself over when it does finally show up on iTMS.

Amen! I agree 100%. I get so fed up with the mindless adoration of The Beatles and their arrival on iTunes will be a non-event for me. The Beatles are the sacred cows to a generation that claimed to have no sacred cows and I get a little tired of hearing how great they are and how there will never be anything like them again and... blah blah. About 1 in every 5 Beatles songs is worth hearing and the rest is junk. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"? Bleh... worst song ever.

The one thing that really annoys me is that The Beatles are so often cited as the originators of the whole psychelic movement when, in fact, it was Pink Floyd who were down in the trenches pushing the psychedelic sound. Pink Floyd were the young upstarts playing the clubs when that movement started and The Beatles appropriated that whole thing from there. The real father of psychedelia was Syd Barrett who died last year with hardly any notice from the press. Check out some of the stuff he did and tell me Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still that impressive.

So yeah, The Beatles. Meh... I hope this announcement is more than that.

 

[dakis]

For those who dont read German, it says in a nut shell that the CEO of EMI who was in Florida (29th March) for the CTIA trade show had made some comments about the market for download of mobile phone ringtones.

They're not saying anything about ringtones - they're talking about mobile music downloads which could be huge with the iPhone.

dakis

 

[gavd]

<snip>

So yeah, The Beatles. Meh... I hope this announcement is more than that.

Well apparently both Retuers and the WSJ say it's nothing to do with the Beatles and will be about DRM so you might get what you want.

 

[dakis]

So, it comes down to DRM or Apple buying EMI... nothing else could be so important to move TWO CEOs..

I would bet on the second one, considering all the other things I recapped before...

gotta be DRM. If Apple were to buy EMI, the iTunes Store would go down the drain. The other labels present in the store would pack up and leave immediately if the store were to be run by an Apple-EMI merger.

But to be honest - I'm not sure I'd be very happy about the DRM thing either. Sure, I'd love to see DRM go just as much as anyone else. But if Apple started to get rid of DRM for SOME of the songs offered in the iTunes store, that would create a huge mess. We have a download store in Switzerland that sells unprotected MP3s from some lables but also DRMed Windows Media files. You'd have to check the DRM status for every single file before you buy in case you want the music for devices other than the iPod.

dakis

 

[motulist]

Amen! I agree 100%. I get so fed up with the mindless adoration of The Beatles and their arrival on iTunes will be a non-event for me. The Beatles are the sacred cows to a generation that claimed to have no sacred cows and I get a little tired of hearing how great they are and how there will never be anything like them again and... blah blah. About 1 in every 5 Beatles songs is worth hearing and the rest is junk. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"? Bleh... worst song ever.

The one thing that really annoys me is that The Beatles are so often cited as the originators of the whole psychelic movement when, in fact, it was Pink Floyd who were down in the trenches pushing the psychedelic sound. Pink Floyd were the young upstarts playing the clubs when that movement started and The Beatles appropriated that whole thing from there. The real father of psychedelia was Syd Barrett who died last year with hardly any notice from the press. Check out some of the stuff he did and tell me Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still that impressive.

So yeah, The Beatles. Meh... I hope this announcement is more than that.

Um, Pink Floyd are friggen awesome, they really are, but I'm pretty sure you're significantly confused about who did what when and why what they did was important.

The Beatles' came out with the album Rubber Soul in 1965, and Revolver in 1966, both totally ground breaking (and psychedelic, but I don't think that's the main important thing about those albums). Pink Floyd's first album was released in 1967.

 

[Project]

Wall Street Journal are saying its to announce a DRM free catalogue. WSJ are almost always right when it comes to Appple news because of the ties the two companies have.

cid:image003.jpg@01C77488.687D87E0


EMI to Sell Much of its Music
Without Antipiracy Software

By ETHAN SMITH and NICK WINGFIELD
April 1, 2007 8:27 p.m.

In a major reversal of the music industry's longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce Monday that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

[dontmatter]

what about indie labels? Will they choose to go DRM free too, or be allowed to? I could see apple making this an "exclusive" to EMI thing.

Or an april fools joke. We'll know soon.

 

[Project]

The announcement is the 2nd. This is no April Fools.

This is history

 

[hatcher002]

cough cough

cough cough bs nice april fouls joke . i better keep dreamming

 

[motulist]

You don't have to like a single thing they ever did - there's a lot that doesn't "speak to me".

Totally. Most people don't know how prolific the Beatles were and how greatly their style changed from one album to the next. These guys put out a LOT of songs and spanned a LOT of different styles. Most people today, myself included, think their early stuff can be kinda cute and catchy, but is mostly just fluff. But if you listen to their mid to late career stuff like Revolver, these songs are still amazingly awesome today.

They are as important to pop music as Mozart, or Wagner, or Copland are to their era... they are arguably the most important musical act of the mid- to late twentieth century for the influence they had.

This is simply a fact (though there's never been a formal study or anything). When you ask the musicians that have been popular over the last 50 years who they were influenced by, far and away the most common answer you hear is the Beatles.

I wouldn't insult you with a smug "you had to be there," because that actually taints my appreciation of them.

I wasn't "there," they were before my time, but they still managed to become my favorite band of all time.

The potential of their catalog being released digitally is akin to DaVinci's works being released after years of being withheld from public view, except for photographs.

I have to disagree with you here. All of their material has been available for decades in even HIGHER quality than you'd get from iTunes.

 

[Applespider]

Somewhat true. But I think that Steve Jobs (being a the CEO of a major company) has other business to take care of in Europe.

Precisely... who's to say that he doesn't have a meeting with a prospective Euro-iPhone carrier in the morning, the EMI thing over lunch and a meeting to convince Euro-movies in the late afternoon before nipping over to Rome to see his newest store and have a plate of pasta...

We know one thing that Jobs is doing over here

 

[kugino]

if the rumors are indeed true - non-DRM tunes on iTunes - then it's a big step in the right direction. will that entice me to buy? no...it's not DRM that keeps me from buying, rather the poor quality files. get me up to 256 AAC and i'd buy, but 128 is just a tad too lossy for me.

thumbs up on the removal of DRM, though!

 

[a456]

must be something big for steve to be in London.

My thoughts exactly. Although the whole DRM issue is big news for the whole iPod/iTunes debate and the industry in general, I wouldn't class it as an 'exciting new digital offering'. The Beatles back catalogue preloaded on an iPod (with multi-touch? - it was after all Apple's birthday yesterday).

 

[BobbyDigital]

If this happens, I can see the rest of the labels following suit within a reasonable amount of time. This is the beginning of the end!!! (of DRM)

 

[juniormaj]

Thankyou captain obvious, but 1 dollar is still to much for a song considering I payed less than that per song when I bought the eminem show for 17 dollars way back in the day and I got a cd, cd case and a booklet.

I'm not so sure 2002 qualifies as "way back in the day".
And although that CD has 20 tracks, 5 of those are "skits" that each last about 1 minute or less (3 of them are 30 seconds or less).
That leaves you with 15 songs.

 

[gavd]

If this happens, I can see the rest of the labels following suit within a reasonable amount of time. This is the beginning of the end!!! (of DRM)

That would be nice!

 

[winstano]

and i still think selling DRM free music is a huge risk. people argue that DRM free music exists on p2p network in the form of files from CDs. I find this a very weak argument.

I still don't have a compelling reason why files should be DRM free. Can someone give me one? and I am not from RIAA either; in fact, they should replace some country as Axis of Evil

Although there'll be no DRM, there will be some forms of identification in the tracks...

This will have to be made absolutely clear in the press statement later today...

Essentially, EMI have been looking at watermarking. This means that the file, while not encrypted with DRM, will have some methods of identifying the person who bought it. It's a fair system that will allow the users to play the stuff they buy on iTunes on any single system or device.

I'm just a little pissed that this announcement is today. My dissertation's on DRM, and it's got to be in on the 30th of this month. Which doesn't really give me that much time to change the structure of it etc to incorporate this...

 

[dakis]

After having read the reports again, I speculate the following will happen today:

EMI announces the availability of their entire back-catalog DRM-free on the iTunes store.
For now, there won't be any changes in the way they sell their current stuff.

 

[jonharris200]

Anyone got a link or explanation of this 'watermarking' thing that has been mentioned as a possible replacement for FairPlay? What is it and how might it work?

 

[Diablo]

The date for the launch of the Beatles as downloads and the re-issued, re-mastered albums with updated sleeves is likely to be 1st June. This will be the 40th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's launch in 1967 (and the 20th annivesary of the CDs launch in 1987.)

There'll be a massive media hype around this date anyway as there was in 1987 and 1997 with all the music magazines doing special issues and documentaries on TV so it makes sense to launch the remixes on this date if it's going to be this year. Since all the re-mixing has been done, they're holding back for a special launch. I think it'll be 1st June.

 

[Applespider]

I'm just a little pissed that this announcement is today. My dissertation's on DRM, and it's got to be in on the 30th of this month. Which doesn't really give me that much time to change the structure of it etc to incorporate this...

Better today than on 29 April? And just think how much extra credit you'll get if your dissertation is bang up to date...

 

[bleachthru]

I certainly hope this is true. It would be a nice change, it has seemed to me that over the last few years, all that has really been accomplished is adding to this sub-conscience list of things people are not allowed to do and ways of enforcing these things. Hopefully this will spark a more widely accepted cultural turn around....it is nice to feel trusted, and not forcefully policed all the time!