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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, April 28, 2003
18:36 - All becomes clear
http://www.apple.com/music/

(top) link
The questions about Apple's new music service appear to be answering themselves.

After a period of several hours today when it was just about impossible to push any search/browse queries through, or to log in to one's charge account (as others have noticed), the iTunes Music Store now seems to be clicking along quite smoothly. I've downloaded several experimental tracks-- hey, at a dollar a pop, it's at a price point where I don't mind the exploration fee-- and with the exception of a few obscure bugs in things like dialog box redraws when switching application panes, there seem to be no big problems with the service itself. Nice crisp audio, encoded at a bitrate that gives somewhat clearer sound than MP3 and at 80% the file size. I can get behind that.

The selection of available music is sort of weird. The large majority of content appears to be from the Universal/Vivendi label, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise; but that doesn't account for nearly all of it. There's stuff from just about every label on here. But there are some striking omissions; I'm sure every reviewer in the world will give 'em hell over the lack of any Beatles albums. (Just wait for the gleeful "Apple Records" insights to flow...) Judging by the "Coming Soon..." signs on a lot of artists' search-result pages and purchase association boxes, I suspect that the database is not completely populated yet, and the labels are probably watching today's searchin'-and-purchasin' dynamics very carefully to see whether they want to dive in all the way or beat a hasty retreat. If the morning's sluggishness is any indication of heavy usage and commerce volume, I should think we'll be seeing a greater selection very shortly. I'm not worried about that.

What's been more of a concern to those of us who have been eyeing this development with some alarm is the implications of DRM and the music sharing/personal privacy argument. How would Apple solve this? How did they make this service attractive to the labels, and yet ensure that users would not toss it aside as too onerous and cumbersome and invasive to put up with? Apple customers, taken as a whole, are a demanding lot; for a platform that has a reputation for being full of novices, the numbers these days are such that Mac users tend to be more savvy and well-educated in the ways of the digital age than the average extremely casual Windows user, a demographic that makes up a huge silent majority. More Mac users than Windows users, by percentage, will shun things like AOL and MSN and anything that looks like them.

So Apple knew they had to win these people over; just because Mac people are so fanatically supportive of Apple doesn't mean they won't crucify Steve over a ham-handed and abusive music service that embodies every fear they associate with Microsoft. (Witness the flap over Sherlock 3 and Watson, which still is making waves and generating resentment.) What they've come up with appears to be very much in the spirit of Safari: laid-back, convenient, helpful without being intrusive, and actively trying to minimize the annoyances we all hate about e-commerce: just as Safari has built-in pop-up blocking, iTunes' Music Service has no pop-ups or banner ads. Just searchable and clickable titles in pleasant layouts, an easy hierarchical architecture, and "Buy Song" buttons integrated into the standard iTunes interface.

So, that's all well and good. But what about the DRM? Surely Apple doesn't just let you download songs and then run amok with them...?

Nope. You get three computers on which to play your music. Three. This is enforced as follows:

You login to the system using your Apple ID, which can be your ID from the Apple Store or your .Mac account; you associate it with a credit card and set up the linkage. Then you download a track (the default behavior is "1-Click"-- you can also choose to use a shopping cart workflow); it goes straight into your Music Library. It's an .m4p file, or "MPEG-4 Protected" (as opposed to .m4a, or "MPEG-4 Audio"). This file is tagged with an encrypted signature which locks it to your Apple ID account. This signature can only be locked/unlocked by entering your password and sending a query to the central Apple server. So they have a central key database; this is the kind of thing we've always worried about when hearing about .Net and Hailstorm and so on, warning of the dire danger of such a rich hacker target. But the key database is only half the security equation; I'll leave it up to the security experts to decide how vulnerable the system is, as implemented here. It doesn't seem like it's that terrible, on the face of it.

So then, let's say you want to take that .m4p file and play it on another computer. You can do it one of two ways: share it through automatic streaming ("Music Sharing"), or copy it. If you enable Music Sharing, you open up your laptop, and the playlists on your other machine show up among the data sources. You can then go and double-click on the song to play it. But iTunes notices that it's a protected AAC file; it checks and finds that your laptop is not authorized to play songs tagged for your account. So it gives you an authentication box; you put in your password, and it unlocks your account for that computer. Now you have two of your authorization "slots" used up. (The first becomes used on the first machine as soon as you play your first downloaded song.) From then on, you can play any music downloaded through that account on either computer.

It's the same if you copy the actual .m4p file over. You can open it up in the Finder's Preview pane and play it; but unless the OS has been unlocked for your music account, even the Finder won't be able to play it; it pops up a dialog asking you to authorize the computer through iTunes (there's an "Open iTunes" button). Once you authorize it, the song starts playing in the Finder. So that's how you'd go about moving your whole file collection from one computer to the other.

Because you can "deauthorize" computers, too. You get three "slots" for authorized computers, which you can dole out and reapportion at any time. You can go to Advanced->Deauthorize Computer and enter your password to lock the .m4p files back up; then you get a slot back, and you can assign it to a different computer, like if you wanted to share music with someone else's computer at work for a brief period.

I like how they came up with the number 3 for the total number of authorizations; in the Help, it talks about listening to music on "your home iMac, your iBook, and your work computer". What, are they looking over my shoulder or something? This sounds like a perfectly reasonable number of Macs for a person to use simultaneously, beyond which Apple and the labels can reasonably start to wonder just how much use you're getting out of those downloaded tracks.

(You now have the choice to rip songs from CD as AAC files, by the way. If you do, they're created as .m4a files, and they're not locked in any way; you can share them freely via Rendezvous, e-mail, LimeWire, whatever. You can continue to import in MP3 as well.)

Apple has struck a very workable balance here, I think. This isn't pay-for-play, or some dumb scheme like that; but neither is it so free and unfettered as to drive away the labels. This isn't a vampire tap into the user's checkbook, but nor is it a business non-starter. It's somewhere in between.

And it's clear that Apple's goal here is not to hobble the everyday legal user of music, or to suck his wallet dry at all opportunities, but to hamper the mass-producers and broadcasters. They've implemented blocks and security technologies which you can work around, but not without a lot of effort. You can copy .m4p files all around the office, and enable them one at a time for each person (though never more than three at once), but the incentive for that is nil. Just as you can poke and prod at an iPod until it can be used to ferry MP3 files from one computer to another; but who wants that kind of hassle? Most users won't even want to do that, and those who want to make mischief will find themselves tripped up. Apple's figured out that the best kind of DRM is the kind that doesn't get in the way of law-abiding users, but does get in the way of would-be flouters of the rules. And they seem to have worked to that design spec.

Another example of that is the fact that you can only burn ten copies of a given unaltered playlist. After that, you can shuffle the tracks around, or re-create the playlist; but that takes some work. (Plus it might keep a database of past playlists, so even if you create the same one over again, it might recognize it as the same thing you had before.) Fine, someone says-- I'll just keep changing the playlist! Yeah, but that sort of defeats the purpose of a mass-produced bootleg, doesn't it? Again, this isn't a block that's impossible to work around; but it does trip up the scriptability of second-hand mass production. Same with how you can burn CDs of individual songs all you like-- the casual user gets that functionality without restriction, but that doesn't exactly provide a honeypot of a weakness to someone trying to bootleg. Or you could register tons of Apple IDs, but that's not exactly automatable, and they all have to be tied to a credit card, so what's the point? And finally, you could simply resample the audio stream to an MP3 with an audio loopback cable; but you could do that with a CD, even a copy-protected one. The point is that the only kind of piracy you can really get away with is small-scale, laborious stuff; there are enough monkey-wrenches present to counter large-scale piracy that it's unlikely to be an issue.

And in the meantime, the system works really well-- it's design is simple yet sophisticated, effortless yet satisfying. People are going to enjoy using this service, and even enjoy paying for it. The incentive to pirate will be greatly diminished, and that's the real key.

When the labels reportedly said, "This is what we've been waiting for"-- it may well have been code for an understanding of the digital age in which they realized that they wouldn't be able to extract payment for every single track, every single playback; but they would be able to continue to exist and even thrive, if only they backed a technology that people wanted to use even if it contained security technology. As long as those security features didn't hinder people from enjoying the product, all they really had to do was stick the occasional twig into the spokes of those who would take advantage of the system. That seems to be exactly what Apple's done here.

I have yet to really start to use this system, but I'm sure I will. I wasn't wild about the idea of DRM in the first place, and I'm still not; but let's talk about the spirit of the thing. Just as UN Res 1441 was all about the spirit of cooperation, of Saddam's acting in good faith to provide inspectors with evidence of compliance with previous UN resolutions, rendering the actual implementation rather moot-- Apple's understanding of the spirit of proper DRM and listeners' rights here seems to transcend the binary support or abhorrence of any and all DRM. They're actively trying to "do the right thing", here, and make some money while they're at it. I'd say they get plenty of points for making the effort under such a banner. It could have been a whole helluva lot worse, after all. This may be the closest thing to "the best of both worlds" as we've seen in a while.

I'm getting excited about acquiring music again, for the first time in ages-- and from what I'm hearing, I'm not the only one.


UPDATE: Oh yes: What happens if you pay for a song, but then your Net connection gets cut off before you can finish downloading it? Good question. Apparently the credit-card transaction occurs at the time you click to begin the download; but Apple records whether the download completed successfully, so you can then go back with the Advanced->Check for Purchased Music option, and if there's anything pending, you can re-download it. However, there doesn't seem to be a facility to re-download tracks that you are "entitled to"; you can, if you choose, pay for a song a second time. It doesn't protect you against the loss of all the copies you might have of the file; that's your responsibility.

UPDATE: Here's some info from Apple on the authorization/deauthorization process. One interesting bit:
Note: Initializing the drive will not deauthorize the computer. If you will be initializing the drive, deauthorize the computer first, then initialize the drive.

So the authorization status survives a drive reformat? I guess that means the status is governed by the central server primarily; I guess it also means you can't fool the system if you take a computer that's been deauthorized, then restore its disk image from a backup that still thinks it's authorized (and then never connect to the Music Store again). I wonder how this is done...

Another UPDATE: Several people have called my attention to the fact that the Music Store has a "Request" mechanism-- three links down on the main screen, you can fill out a form to request that they add your suggested artist, album, song, genre, or whatever. No real indication of how binding that would be-- but it tells me that the selection is bound to start blossoming in the near future. The current omissions are presumably a result the taste of whoever made the initial selections for populating the database, rather than any contractual obligations.

Cool.


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© Brian Tiemann