technology

More on upcoming digital music failures

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Om Malik has a good post about how most of the digital music download services are doomed to fail. I wrote about this yesterday and Om’s post just reinforces what I wrote.

Mobile music on phones via cellular companies is going to be the most overrated business move. Why? Mobile operators are not known for their ease of use, and even today (barring voice) new phones are inherently complex. Have you tried to look up calendar or contact information on a Motorola? Imagine downloading music, and listening to it on a phone.

The services that I think will suceed in the long run (besides iTunes) are the likes of emusic.com
that offer music from independant musicians (DEATH TO THE RIAA!!) completely free of any drm. The service is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and lets users listen to the music anywhere they want thanks to the lack of drm.

Music Cell Phones will fail miserably

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I have been reading lots of items in recent months about how analysts and cell phone providers are convinced that mobile phones and the providers music download services will defeat the iPod. I believe that they are all completely wrong for a number or reasons. Number one is the greed of the music industry and the cell phone companies. Right now iTunes and other music download services charge $.99 a song. I personally think that this is already to high given that the product is already crippled by DRM and lower sound quality than a physical CD (I won’t even get into the fact that most of the stuff pushed by the major labels is complete crap, that is for another time). Considering that the distribution costs are vastly smaller for downloading than phycical distribution, the labels have absolutely no justification pushing for higher prices which apparently exactly what they are pushing apple to do. The phone companies are even worse, they apparently want to charge as much as $3 a song. I don’t even get why people would pay that much for a 30 second clip to use a ringtone, who in there right mind would pay that much for songs that you have to download over the slow cellular network (probably using up your minutes at the same time).

Now, how this all affects mobile is that there will be a huge tide of MP3 players from a number of different vendors coming into the market, in the form of music-enabled phones. So what’s going to happen when you’ve got all these different phones being billed by carriers as iPod killers or replacements and people come to find out their music won’t play on them, or they can only listen to music that’s been bought from one specific store or service? They’re going to get pissed off, that’s what’s going to happen. They won’t buy music that’s tied to a specific device or has onerous limitations on what they can do with it — which will probably rule out any carrier’s download store from being a success. Regardless of how the record labels see things, people want to own their music, and owning music means being able to do with it what you like, and play it on whatever device you want. This means that vendors that focus on syncing, rather than playing along with carriers’ dowload shop dreams, will be the winners. Few operators understand this, though, and their stranglehold on the retail channel means it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to succeed.

Worse still than this is the drm restrictions that want to put on the music. The phone companies don’t want us to listen to music that we already bought, they want us to buy it all over again. Apple and Motorola have been working on a mobile version of itunes to use on moto phones for over a year. Apparently it has been ready to go for quite some time. The problem is the phone companies wont sell it. The phone has apparently been configured so that users can take music they have already bought from itunes, and load it onto their phones just like they do on an ipod. This is unacceptable to the phone companies because they only want people to buy music from them. of course they don’t want you to transfer the songs so if you lose, break or upgrade your phone, you have to start all over again. So you get to pay a lot more for a lot less functionality. Of course their are other issues like the poor battery life of a fun that is playing music, the lousy user interface, etc. Well I don’t think people are that dumb. People want there phones to be good phones, and there music players to be good music players. Most importantly they don’t want to get ripped off by their phone company.

Record and phone companies have shown no signs yet of common sense when it comes to business pratices, so I am confident that the mobile music business will be a miserable failure.

Doug Kaye on public radio

This entry was posted in podcasting technology on by

I was a long time listener to public radio. But in recent years I have largley given up on it and have stopped contributing money. The major programs like Morning Edition, All things considered, and talk of the nation have become more and more like commercial radio, parroting the statements of the Shrub administration and being less questioning of government policies, especially during the lead up to the Iraq war. I still listen to selected programs like On the Media and Le Show but I listen to them in podcast form. I almost never turn on the radio. Because of th enormous amount of money required to do tradional radio, NPR (and PBS and Corp for Public Broadcasting, especially CPB under republican hack Ken Tomlinson) have become water carriers for the government because they are terrified of getting completely de-funded. There is also the issue ofwanting to here the programs when I want to listen to them, not necessarilly when stations decide to broadcast them, if the local stations carry them at all.

Doug Kaye, who runs the amazing IT Conversations site and podcasts has a very good post on the future of public radio. In essence it like other mainstream media are doomed.

This started for me when I blogged about Doc’s suggestion that we all call our local public radio stations and request they carry the new show. It took me no time at all to realize how little sense that made. There’s no doubt that if KQED-FM were to broadcast the show at all, it would be at some obscure time of day when I wasn’t likely to listen. No, that’s not even correct. There’s no time of day that would be good for me. I don’t plan my days around a radio or TV schedule because, quite frankly, I don’t need to. I have an iPod and I can listen to what I want, where I want and when I want. And given that there’s already more good programming than I have time for, anyone who doesn’t make it easy for me by providing an RSS feed with enclosures simply won’t make the cut. Even in my car, unless it’s just a trip to the grocery store, I no longer tune in a broadcast station

With the technology that is available now and coming in the future, for both creating content, and distributing it, large television and radio networks will soon have no reason whatsoever to exist. This is a good thing because it will allow more specialised programming to flourish. The old technology required content to be generalized in order to make it economically viable. Because the audience for specialised programs might consist of many groups of relatively few people distributed over large geographic areas, it was not feasible to broadcast such programs because of the very limited bandwith of over the air communications. The internet and the technologies that enable podcasting allow these types of programs to reach an audience at relatively low cost now. A major change is underway in the media and it is irreversible no matter what main stream media tries to do about it.

Nostalgic for Michael Powell 2

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I never thought I would nostalgic for the days of Michael Powell as head of the FCC but the new chairman Kevin Martin really scares me. I was very much opposed to Powell’s deregulation at all costs, that helped accelerate the consolidation of major media. However recent developments like podcasting, blogging and other means of network distribution of media are making traditional mainstream media increasingly irrelevant. However, now under Kevin Martin, the FCC has restated The Four Internet Freedoms originally put out under Powell’s reign. The FCC was created to regulate communications to ensure that limited public assets like the airwaves for tv and radio were used wisely for the public good. Now however, they seem to be focused on restricting what should be a limitless network for human communications in order to protect the entrenched but increasingly under pressure media oligarchy, from the new realities and the public be damned. Look at what they have now said:

How Martin’s FCC is different from Powell’s
The difference between the Powell FCC and the Martin FCC (.doc, .pdf) is clear in the re-statement of The Four Internet Freedoms issued Friday! Also see Martin’s statement (.doc, .pdf) and, for example, this article on Powell’s Four Internet Freedoms.

Powell: Freedom to access content.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Powell: Freedom to run applications.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;

Powell: Freedom to attach devices.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Powell: Freedom to obtain service plan information.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

And the Martin FCC adds an important footnote:

All of these principles are subject to reasonable network management.

Follow the link above the quote to see more. I found this through Om Malik’s Blog

Lasik 4

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Jules had lasik yesterday and it is working great. She went from barely being able to see me across a dinner table to 20/25 in less than 24 hours. It will apparently get better over the next month and then stabilize. This morning we had to go back to the clinic in Windsor for the 24 hour follow up and every thing is looking great. The problem was coming back. The freeways in the detroit area are all torn up right now. Both major east-west highways (I-94 and I-96) are all torn up and at least partly closed. What a mess. Getting the Lasik donw in Windsor saved about 40% compared to the same procedure in the US. Apparently in this country, clinics have to pay Bausch and Lomb a royaltie for every single procedure thay do, whereas in Canada they just buy the equipment form them and don’t have to pay them anymore.

Podcasting

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In the past 9 months I have all but abandoned radio after 35= years of consistent listening. My ipod is now with me almost all the time. I listen to music that I have accumulated over the years from cds and vinyl and now to podcasts. Podcasts are audio (or video) programs that are included as enclosures with RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. The audio programs are generally in mp3 format. You can use any of several “podcatching” clients like ipodder, ipodderx, doppler or others to subscribe to the podcasts. They can automatically check subscribed feeds, download new programs and load them into your media player software and create a playlist. It works with any mp3 player (although ipods are still the best out there) The latest version of itunes (4.9) also has podcasting capability built right in. If you want to learn more visit podcastalley.com.

Basically what this means is that you subscribe to a podcast feed and then it is automatically downloaded to your computer and mp3 player whenever there is a show. There are podcasts on almost every subject imaginable, politics, tech, movies, music, comedy etc. Thanks to the intransigence of the RIAA podcasting has become a wonderful forum for finding all kinds of awesome new music. I have heard more great new bands in the last 9 months than I have heard in the last 15 years on the radio.

Goodbye radio. You blew it!!. I only listen to podcasts now.