iPod therefore iTunes

Just about everyone who owns any kind of digital portable music player owns an iPod. Variants of the Apple device have commanded over 80 percent of the mp3 player market for years, and the line has cachet above and beyond simple numbers: consider, for example, that just about every raffle on campus with a prize of significant value this year has given ticket-holders or survey-takers the opportunity to win an iPod nano. Even my parents own an iPod.

The iPod-ification of America might not have caught us completely by surprise—after all, the iPod has, in every incarnation, been better designed than most of its competition, and it has also been the subject of an incredibly successful marketing blitz that has transformed it from mere music player into status symbol. Further, there are some real benefits to owning the same gadgets as all your friends—accessories are cheap, tech support is easy to come by, and the bragging rights are indisputable.

But there are costs, too. Sony, for example isn’t happy about all of this – their substitute product hasn’t fared nearly as well as the iPod, and while this could be the result of inferior design or lesser advertising, it might be worth considering the possibility that there are more sinister forces in play.

Apple, it turns out, has other products and services, among them the well-regarded and quite successful iTunes Music Store—a haven where music-lovers can, for just a dollar per track, download major label songs which they can burn to CDs or load onto their iPod.

Those tracks, it further transpires, have an interesting feature: they can only be loaded onto an iPod—not a Sony “Network Walkman,” nor a “Dell DJ Ditty,” nor even a “MobiBlu DAH.” There are other music stores, of course—Sony has their own, Napster has been rebranded from a dotcom-era law-defiant hotbed of copyright criminality into a legal market for music, and even Walmart has entered the fray. And you can play the songs from these stores on any mp3 player you’d like from Sony, Dell, or Creative—but not on your iPod.

The culprit for this state of affairs is a set of proprietary technologies under the umbrella of “Digital Rights Management” (DRM), which Apple and everyone else sticks onto their songs to control how they can be used—how many CDs they can be burned to, how many different computers can play them, and so on. The major record labels all want DRM on songs sold online because they’re afraid (perhaps rightly so) that without technological measures protecting their intellectual property, vagrant Harvard students (and those at comparable institutions) will steal it and deprive them of revenue.

They key word in the previous paragraph is “proprietary”: everyone has their own version of DRM. Many stores use a Microsoft standard, but Apple uses their own (called FairPlay), and that’s the one iPods are equipped to deal with. That means that any of the twenty million and some-odd iPod owners looking to buy music online have only one option for most songs. And once they’ve sunk a couple of bucks into these purchases, they’ve begun to build up a powerful financial disincentive against ever buying a music player not made by Apple: it wouldn’t be able to play any of the tracks they bought on iTunes.

You can’t blame Apple for not wanting to use anything that comes out of Microsoft, but you still might find another of their practices unsavory: the reason none of the other mp3 players or music stores are compatible with Apple products is that Apple (unlike Microsoft, who in this rare instance are playing the ‘good guys’) refuses to license their FairPlay technology so that others can use it.

Apple isn’t alone in pushing closed standards—Microsoft is, for example, guilty as well, with their “.doc” file format. But such standards, while for obvious reasons appealing to big corporations, are anti-competitive, and they certainly hurt consumers looking for variety. If Apple doesn’t have a deal with the right record label to sell you the song you want, or if you’ve bought every Bob Dylan album available on iTunes but now really like the new mp3 players from Samsung, well, you’re out of luck.

It’s unlikely these concerns alone will suffice to dissuade many would-be iPod owners from making their purchases, but it is worth noting that there are alternatives that let you use an iPod without selling away your right to switch. At least one online music store, eMusic, is home to a wide variety of songs (though not quite as wide as the major download businesses) which sell for substantially less money (roughly a quarter per track, instead of a dollar) and are completely DRM free. The labels and artists who have put their music for sale on eMusic have agreed, essentially, to trust their fans with unrestricted digital tracks (in much the same way that, willing or not, the major labels trust listeners who buy CDs).

Endeavors like eMusic are to be looked out for and commended because they at once provide us, the consumers, with music that comes without strings attached, and also inform Apple and others like them that we understand the benefits to a fair market (lower prices, for one) and don’t want to be locked up in our music choices.

However evil the intentions of the electronics industry, my parents aren’t likely to go back to lugging around piles of CDs any time soon, and we’ll all still be more willing to fill out questionnaires about summer research when there’s a potential iPod nano involved. Still, none of this means that we can’t start demanding that Apple begin to take its own advice, and play fair with FairPlay.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.