Music Downloads and Easy vs. Free

December 15, 2007 - Leave a comment...

I’m sitting in the Nashville International Airport waiting for a giant metal bird to take me home for Christmas. In the mean time, I caught this gem of a post by my friend Chris Penn. Here’s a clip:

Music industry – the lesson is not that free will always win. EASY will always win. I could rip this track for free by breaking the DRM and converting to an MP3, but that’s 10 minutes of my day I can spend doing something else (like blogging about it). That would be free, but I want easy. I value my time more than my money, because I can always make money, but my lifespan is finite and irreplaceable.
-It’s Not Easy Being Legal

The larger implications of his post are debated on his site (which I recommend you check out, it’s a good read), but that paragraph in particular really resonated. I’m the kind of guy who will look on iTunes for a track, then go steal it if it ain’t there. I don’t buy CD’s unless I’m at a live concert, and if a label is too stupid to get their music on iTunes (especially here in the US), they’ve told me that they don’t want my money.

I also try and live this philosophy- I’ve got all my selling albums on iTunes (even though Goodbye Planet Earth isn’t listed yet), on CD Baby as both a disc and MP3 download, and on MySpace. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy my music legitimately.

To be honest, I’m kind of glad the major labels aren’t jumping on this with both feet. It puts us independents a step ahead.

[tags]Matthew Ebel, piano rock, Christopher Penn, music industry, iTunes, iTMS, MP3, MySpace, major labels[/tags]

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  • Zimmie

    I occasionally buy physical albums if there’s some sort of extra. For example, Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (Year Zero Remixed) was recently released, and it comes with a DVD that has multitracks of the entire Year Zero album in Ableton Live, GarageBand, and raw WAV formats. It even comes with a demo version of Live.

    Better yet, it only cost $15. I spent $5 more than I would have on iTunes, and I got the music in 16/44.1/stereo PCM along with nearly eight gigabytes of backing data.

    Other than that sort of thing, I just get everything from iTunes and crack it to be DRMless.

  • Pieter

    > Other than that sort of thing, I just get
    > everything from iTunes and crack it to
    > be DRMless.
    That’s still illegal. Doesn’t that violate the DMCA or something like that?

    > even though Goodbye Planet Earth isn’t listed yet
    Just so you know: I found it in the Belgian iTunes Store yesterday. :)

  • Zimmie

    Technically, yes, but seeing as I have a right to Fair Use that was derived from the constitution, and the DMCA is just a law, the constitutional right supersedes any laws trying to block it. It would take a constitutional amendment to really make it illegal to crack DRM on something that you’ve already purchased. I have not yet seen a single court case against someone cracking DRM for themselves, only against companies offering to do it for you or selling tools to do it. Now, if I were to share the music, then they could sue me for copyright infringement, but they’d be stupid to go after me for simply stripping the encryption from music I’ve purchased.

    As for why I do it, there was recently some big baseball news. Major League Baseball decided that they were no longer going to sell videos of games and that they were shutting down the DRM authentication servers. People had paid quite a bit of money for videos of these games, and without the authentication servers, they are left with encrypted files that their computers won’t let them access. Note that Major League Baseball hasn’t closed up shop or anything, they just decided to stop letting people play their legitimately purchased video files. The official statement I read was that they were not going to be providing refunds, either. Admittedly, this was a while ago and the position may have since changed, but the idea is the same.

    I don’t want my ability to use my purchased files and devices to be subject to the whim of a single company.

  • Pieter

    Yay for the constitution! I’m not sure if we have similar rights over here in Belgium. About the MLB controversy: I’ve heard about that, Google Video did something similar some time ago. It’s so messed up.

  • http://stephenshores.org Stephen

    Glad I stumbled across you on Twitter. You have the right philosophy with regards to selling your recordings: keep it simple, inexpensive, and let the people purchase it wherever and however they want. I respect that.

  • http://www.myspace.com/brainy275 Noble

    Matt Dude:
    Although i agree with what you said,i point out that i as a music reviewer/site owner,don’t scam or spam for free music as evidenced by my proven track Record.
    I have reviewed over twenty artists so far since 2001.Some have sent promos of thier records while others get mean or say”I Don’t Have Anything to send you” or”That was Discontinued long ago” Funny how it seems that the AsiaMayazen album by Greg Williams is still available on Amazon.com! It is still being offered by the label(No Site yet).Thanks.