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Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Lie Down with Dogs
Apple’s new ringtones were, unusually for Apple, very badly done, indeed.
I bought my first Apple computer system (my third computer) in 1988, a Mac II. In the 19 years since, I and my wife have owned, I don’t know, maybe 25 different Macs in nearly as many models, run every MacOS version around (as well as MkLinux and A/UX), owned a couple of iPods and currently own two iPhones. In fact, we have never owned a desktop or laptop that was not a Mac since I got the Mac II, and the only PCs I have owned have been Linux servers. It’s safe to say that we are pretty content with Apple, as a general rule. I like being able to come home from work, where things are often failing to work well, and use a system that just works almost all the time.
Granted, I’m not in Apple’s normal target audience: I am a bit of a computer geek. Let me say that another way: my first computer (a Color Computer) is 26 years old, and still in working order, though currently in my parents’ closet; my first computer language was BASIC and my second was B6809E assembly; my first OS was TRSDOS but my second was OS9 and my third was UNIX; I have been coding since I was twelve, and have been an IT professional for over 15 years. I mean, look at my resume!
Not only am I a very computer-literate user who has been a long-time and happy Apple user (though they came close to losing me with their years in the desert selling barely-upgraded versions of System 7), I am also quite a big music fan, and so is my wife. Again, let me say that slightly differently. We have about 8000 music tracks (of more than 10500 total tracks) in our iTunes library, which does not include the stuff we kept on vinyl (which would add about another 500 tracks) or the CDs we just realized we didn’t have completely scanned in (which would add less than a hundred tracks). There are several bands that we own essentially their entire corpus, and I do not mean bands with an album or a single to their name, but bands with twenty albums and a dozen collaborations and bands besides their main band. There are albums we own by bands whose members probably don’t remember the band (Northurn Lyghts comes to mind; go ahead, google it). I have songs that predate not just iTunes, not just CDs, but Apple itself, in amongst my vinyl. (Go ahead and try to find Renaissance on CD.) Ah, heck, here’s the current list.
So given all that, you might think that I would be a natural customer for Apple’s new ringtones for the iPhone. I am decidedly not, and there are many reasons why. You see, Apple has made blunders in almost every area touched by the feature: availability, pricing, sources, flexibility and even interface, normally Apple’s strongest point. First, the ringtones were not available as soon as the iPhone came out. Given that the phone includes an iPod, which exists to play audio files, and that ringtones are, wait for it, audio files, and that the users have (presumably; is Apple calling us thieves?) paid for that music already without any license other than that implied by copyright law (unless they purchased the music digitally, in which case they probably agreed to further restrictions on themselves), and that iTunes already has the ability to set a song’s start and end times, how difficult would it have been for Apple to allow customers to set any tune already on the iPod as a ringtone? Obviously, it would have been trivial, which makes the lack of availability odd, to say the least.
Of course, the availability problem goes hand in hand with the pricing problem: apparently the music companies (which, frankly, give lawyers and used car salesman a good name by comparison) were pulling all kinds of lawsuit threats, or threats of pulling their music from iTMS entirely, to leverage Apple into giving the labels a new revenue stream by making us pay for the same tune multiple times (when we buy it, when we buy it again if we didn’t originally buy it from the iTMS, again when we want to use it as a ringtone, and yet again each time we want to use a different part as a ringtone). Apple is, after all, the third largest retailer of music in the US. So at a bare minimum, a ringtone would cost me $2, even if I just want the ringtone and not the song it comes from for general listening, and given my library, would most likely cost me $3+. Given what a ringtone is for, that price just won’t fly with me; the built-in ones are fine, or I can figure out how to roll my own with very little trouble, or I can wait for someone to do it for me. Oh, someone already has.
The problems of music sources and flexibility are similarly related to the record companies’ predatory practices: if I could use my cassette tape of the Dogs in Space soundtrack to bring in Rooms for the Memory (not available on iTMS or even, so far as I can tell, CD, by the way), or for that matter could pull the audio from the YouTube track, and could use that as a ringtone, well then I couldn’t pay the record companies to use it as a ringtone. Which I can’t do anyway, because it’s only available, so far as I know, on cassette, vinyl and YouTube. So I cannot use music I have elsewhere, even music I might have made myself using Apple’s excellent Garage Band (if I had any talent, that is), as a ringtone, and cannot use a song I’ve already paid for, then paid for again to use the guitar riff at the beginning, to use the drum solo at the end as a ringtone. The software Apple has created to make ringtones, and which it built into iTunes, can clearly do the job technically; it’s just money that is in the way.
But even with all that, Apple did not have to make the last, unforced, error. The interface for buying the ringtones is miserable. In order to do so, you first have to find a song that can be made into a ringtone (back to sources: you can’t even use every song on iTMS as a ringtone) you would want, then pay for it twice. But to do that, you have to sign in to the iTMS with your account and password that are already saved in iTunes specifically to automate the times that you interact with iTMS; the saved password is not used for this. Then, you are presented with a new licensing agreement, which basically takes away a significant portion of the fair use rights copyright law would otherwise entitle you to. After you agree to that, you have some other funkyness (I can’t remember what, exactly; I wish I’d been doing screen shots like Daring Fireball). Then you create the ringtone, which is a very smooth process, and sync it to your iPhone. Except that it doesn’t sync: you have to go through the authorization process for your computer again, even though it’s already authorized or you couldn’t have created the ringtone in the first place (!!!). For those who don’t realize it, Apple’s DRM is very loose, not something that would get in the way of most people, but one of its restrictions is that you can only have 5 systems authorized at any given point to use the music you paid for from iTMS. By the way, this new license you have to “agree” to restricts those ringtones much more severely than the normal Apple DRM: 1 system to 1 phone, if I remember correctly.
So the $1 that I plunked down just to see how it worked was a good investment: I won’t give Apple and the record companies another ringtone sale. But worse than that, it seems that the record companies are pushing Apple into a position where Apple is willing to curb our abilities to use music that we have, ourselves, purchased. What would stop Apple, other than simple decency, from just changing the terms, and the servers, so that we can only use our music on one computer and one iPod? Or only on a pay-per-use model? In the past, I have never doubted Apple’s basic corporate decency, within the limits of a profit-making venture. But with this fiasco, I have begun to doubt.
Will I keep using Apple products? Certainly, and I’ll likely buy more in the near future. Will I keep using iTunes? Certainly; it’s still the best music management system on the market, and it’s the easiest way to get content onto the best music player (the iPod) and best cell phone (the iPhone) that I know of. Will I buy more tracks from iTMS, though? I don’t know. If I can find a utility to strip DRM from the tracks, so that if Apple does suddenly decide to limit them in ways that bother me, I probably would continue to buy from iTMS; it’s quite convenient and a good deal on price. But if they show another tendency in that direction, or if I cannot find a DRM-stripper, then used CD stores will start getting my business again.
Lie down with dogs, Apple, and you might find yourself getting up itching.
Comments
I speak five languages but I’m not sure I understood a word of the first few paragraphs of Mr. Medcalf’s post.
Is he talking about computers? Linux? What the heck?
I need help checking my e-mail.
Posted by Jim Sullivan on 09/13/2007 at 08:07 AMSurrender to the pretty blinking lights…
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 09/13/2007 at 08:57 AMAt least they only stumbled over the ring tones.
After the Rokr mess, I had some doubts that Apple would pull off a cell phone, but bringing the project in house has paid off.
Besides, by the next big Apple event, Job’s RDF will have smoothed over any ruffled feathers and ring tones will be like milk and honey!
Posted by Russell on 09/13/2007 at 12:27 PMYeah, but like I said at the end, it’s not the ring tones: it’s the willingness to limit people’s choices and rights beyond reasonable boundaries in an attempt to jack up revenues (ironically, revenues mostly for the music companies, rather than for Apple or the artists) that bothers me. If they’ll do that for ringtones, why not for other stuff?
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 09/13/2007 at 01:26 PMAs a person who always sets the phone to “vibrate only” I have no direct interest in the ringtone issue--but the “record companies” these days cause me to picture a large dinosaur, as the sky darkens…
Posted by Robert Pearson on 09/13/2007 at 02:42 PMLet’s not have any religious wars here at Eternity Road, Dr. D. Play nice with my co-contributors and my other readers.
I, too, prefer Intel / Microsoft computers and software, but there’s nothing wrong with the Apple stuff that a $1000 gift certificate and about twenty pounds of documentation wouldn’t cure. Apple’s main shortcomings have always been in its marketing, which, not coincidentally, has always been Microsoft’s greatest strength.
Apple’s best stroke was designing a computer for non-computer-literate customers. Had they followed that up with a commitment to an open hardware architecture and liberality about documentation for the API for their MacIntosh O/S, today they’d be neck-and-neck with Microsoft for the corporate desktop. But Steve Jobs didn’t understand the power of an open standard around which others could design third-party products. He also failed to grasp that there are enough computer-literate types to make the availability of programming tools a critical asset—and that the non-computer-literate types are likely to be guided by their geeky friends’ evaluations and advice.
Sigh. It’s an experiment we don’t get to run a second time.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 09/13/2007 at 04:40 PMI’m hardly an OS bigot, though I do go for clean, high-performing, sanely-designed and consistent OSs, which is why Windows is my third choice. Each person makes a decision about what features/characteristics are key to them, and for me a stable system with minimal inconsistencies (all OSs have quirks, but I prefer all the quirks to be similar) and solid stability — an OS that gets out of the way and lets me do what I want with the system — is key. For others, cost is more of a factor, or availability of software, or “cool points”, or any of a dozen or more other factors. I’m libertarian enough not to care what OS or hardware or platform other people use, so long as I have what I need into the bargain.
I agree that Jobs has some very real blind spots. For example, his insistence on an appliance would have made the Mac II not exist, had he won, and I might never have begun using Macs. On the other hand, the appliance computers he wanted to make would have been significantly cheaper (as cheap as or cheaper than PCs) if he had won, so it’s a mixed bag. I am a little worried that Apple is going back to the appliance route with the iPod and, much more significantly, the iPhone. Close development platforms are in no one’s interests other than for the very, very short term.
That said, MS has hardly been an avid fan of open standards, once MS had the upper hand in a given area. “Embrace and extend” was an MS idea, after all, and how open are their monopoly products like the Windows API, the MS Word .doc format and the Xbox?
But in real terms, for most people’s needs, the difference between MacOS, Linux and Windows is essentially zero: they all run standards-based web browsers and email clients; they all run word processors that read and write .doc files and .xls files; they all have graphic file editors and photo management and song management systems; very few people can write good software for any of them, and those can generally write good software for all of them. You can argue about which are better at what for a long time, but each of these systems meets 90% of the needs of 90% of the potential user base.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 09/13/2007 at 06:22 PMFeh, everyone knows BSD is the One True OS.
Or was GNU Herd?
In any case I have Windows, Linux and Mac and home, and all provide hours of tinkering, for good or ill.
“If they’ll do that for ringtones, why not for other stuff?”
As long as Apple Marketing is thinking only short term, which seems to be the case here, it’ll happen again.
Posted by Russell on 09/13/2007 at 06:34 PM
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