The online music rip-off

Take yourself back to the days when everyone bought only CDs. Imagine what you’d have thought of a store that sold discs that might work on your CD player now, but weren’t guaranteed to work on next year’s models. Imagine that some required you to phone the music store on a regular basis to reassure them that you were the legitimate owner, and were that store to go under, all the CDs you bought from it would one day cease playing. And once you started buying music from this store, you found yourself locked into a system that discouraged you from buying from a rival store down the street. Why, you might think, would you have bought anything from a place like that? Well, if you’re like millions of people in the UK, there’s a strong chance you already have.

How to get free music

It’s now four years since the iTunes store launched in the UK, and only now are we beginning to understand the full implications of buying music online. With vinyl or CD you knew where you stood: you bought the album or the single and, provided nobody lost, stole or scratched it, your music would still play in ten years’ time. In the digital download age, however, that can’t be taken for granted.

Digital rights management (DRM) has been a disaster. In December 2006, Bill Gates said “DRM was not where it should be”, admitting that it “causes too much pain for legitimate buyers”. By February 2007, Apple’s Steve Jobs was in agreement: “DRM hasn’t worked, and may never work to halt music piracy,” he noted in an essay. Yet, even though consumers hate it and many industry insiders admit it doesn’t do its job, DRM remains a major part of the online music buying experience.

Pirate-proof?

Why is DRM so contentious? Surely it’s designed to protect the rights of artists and record companies in a climate where, as one international music industry body claims, illegal downloads swamp legitimate music store downloads by a ratio of 20 to 1? The problem is DRM doesn’t affect the pirates, who upload and download DRM-free files often ripped directly from CD. Instead, it affects legitimate buyers in a range of deeply irritating ways.

The first roadblock comes down to Gates’ talk of “simplicity” and “interoperability”, or rather the lack of both. The online music industry has evolved so that, while there are open file format standards – notably MP3 – the major companies have so far preferred proprietary or licensed file formats protected by DRM systems. For instance, the biggest online music retailer, Apple’s iTunes store, sells music in a proprietary, rights-managed form of the AAC codec that incorporates its FairPlay DRM. Bar a few Motorola mobile phones, these files will only play back on Apple’s own iPod devices. iPods, meanwhile, are unable to play the WMA files sold by many rival online music stores. The effect is to trap iPod and iTunes users into what some have called a vertical monopoly. If you buy the world’s most popular music player, you buy your music from the iTunes store. It works for Apple, but does it work for us?

If this is the sort of practice you’d normally expect from Microsoft, then don’t worry – the Redmond boys are at it, too. Having spent four years building up a certification and DRM system, PlaysForSure, Microsoft decided to ignore it entirely when it came to its own Zune device. Instead, it swapped interoperability for an iTunes-style vertical monopoly. While the Zune will play MP3 and unprotected AAC and WMA files, it won’t play DRM-enabled WMA files, including those purchased from Microsoft’s own, now defunct, MSN Music service. Now, Zune owners are encouraged to buy tracks from Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace.
As a result, anyone who purchased music in the past through Napster or MSN and then bought a Zune would be unable to play a portion of their music library on their new toy without first burning all the tracks to CD, then ripping those tracks into a Zune-friendly format, with the attendant loss in quality. It says a lot about the online music industry that anyone thinks this is acceptable.

DRM nightmares

Still, you might think, even if I can’t play my old tracks on my shiny new music player, I can at least guarantee that they’ll play on my computer. Wrong again. DRM-enabled tracks need a licence key to work, and if the software or hardware can’t find one, playback is out of the question.

In March, Sony closed its Connect music service in the US and Europe, promising that customers could continue to enjoy music they’d purchased in Sony’s DRM-enabled stores, but only on their existing music players and their “current PC configuration in accordance with our terms of use”. So if you bought tracks from Sony a few years ago, and next year your hard disk implodes or your DRM files become corrupted, even if you sensibly back up your files in the interim, you’ll still lose your music. Why? Because the licence servers will no longer be there to retrieve the licence keys for your tracks and authorise your computer to play them. The suggested workaround? The old burn-and-rip routine we just outlined.

Microsoft recently threatened to do the same thing, saying it would shut down the licence servers for the MSN Music store on 31 August, before a public outcry forced the software giant to extend that deadline to the end of 2011.

Even if your favoured store’s authentication servers are still live, there’s no guarantee of hassle-free playback. It’s in the nature of DRM – inevitably a complex system involving encryption and the transferral of keys between company servers and private computers – that things can and will go wrong. Uninstalling software, changing a processor, swapping hard disks or using clean-up utilities or Registry sweepers can all affect DRM keys on your PC. Even Apple admits in its online support area that “in some cases, iTunes may ‘forget’ that your music is authorised”.

When the files are DRM-protected WMA files, these issues might not only affect files from one store, but several. Earlier versions of Windows Media Player included a licence-backup option, which allowed you to keep a safe copy of your licences and restore them should you need to. However, the stores weren’t bound to support this, and in Windows Media Player 11 the feature was removed altogether. If a file refuses to play, the application now requests a new licence from the original store. PC Pro’s own David Fearon recently recounted how it took him 29 steps to try to re-enable an album he bought from Napster – and he ultimately failed (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/167music1). You don’t get this kind of hassle with CDs.

The music stores make it easy to buy music, and to the user it seems like you just pay the money, download the track and play it. Behind the scenes, however, the authentication process means that unless you carefully track the number of computers you’ve accessed a library on, back up your DRM keys and make a note of any passwords, you could be left with a series of dud files years down the line.

Money for nothing?

Matters grow even more complex when you factor in subscription services, such as Rhapsody in the US or Napster in the UK. Napster does at least make it clear that, in subscribing to and downloading from the service, you’re not actually buying tracks unless you specifically purchase them. In the words of Napster’s UK marketing manager, Dan Nash, the users are “in effect, renting them”. All the same, it isn’t hard to understand why users become annoyed when, having paid £15 per month, they lose all rights to the music the moment they cancel that subscription.
It also doesn’t help that Napster’s PlaysForSure-based DRM model has its share of flaws. The biggest is that it needs to connect regularly to the service’s servers in order to check subscription status. It’s bad enough that Napster might demand authentication eight to ten times a week, as noted by US blogger Jason Dunn in one post. It’s even more irritating when that process stops you listening to your music when it doesn’t seem able to connect. Listen to Microsoft blogger, Mike Torres. “Two strikes, Napster is out. I am not waiting for a third, I play by my own rules. Which brings me to a declaration: the end-user should never, under any legitimate circumstances, have to worry about copy protection.”

This is always the effect of DRM – it imposes limitations. The iTunes store, for example, limits you to playback from five computers, while Napster limits you to three. Use up your allocation and you’re unable to play your library on a new computer without de-authorising one of your existing systems first. That would be fine, except that you might forget to de-authorise a system before formatting the hard drive or installing a new OS, or not even get the chance if your hard disk or PC goes kaput.

Now things get tricky. Napster will allow you to de-authorise a system without you connecting from it, but you can only de-authorise one system every 30 days. Install Windows Vista on your PC and drop your laptop in the space of a week, and you’re going to have to do without Napster on one or the other. The iTunes store, meanwhile, needs you to de-authorise from the outgoing computer, unless you plump for the “nuclear option” of de-authorising all your machines at once – and this is something you can do only once a year.

It seems that everywhere you look, DRM is telling you what you’re not allowed to do with your purchases and where you’re not allowed to do it. Nearly all the major services have restrictions on how often a playlist can be burned to CD (seven times in the case of iTunes and Napster), and most have limits on how many times a track can be downloaded. Given that you might want to listen to your purchased music over a lifetime, not just a couple of years, it’s likely that we’ll all come up against the limits of DRM at some point in the future.

Of course, there are two ways to circumvent all this. The first is to only purchase music DRM-free. The second is to buy it on CD, rip the disc to MP3, Ogg Vorbis or one of the several lossless formats available, then keep the hard copy as a backup. Even given the fact that new CDs are usually more expensive than an MP3 download, this would seem the safest bet. You get a high-quality digital master in the world’s most standard music format, giving you the flexibility to create new files in new formats as technology moves on. Even here, however, there are issues; not the least being that – amazingly – copying a CD remains technically illegal in the UK.

There’s a proposed exception to the law to cover format-shifting: the process of creating a copy of a work you legally own. The bad news? The Music Business Group wants a licence governing when and how format-shifting should take place, and is asking the government to recognise that it has a monetary value, in the shape of a levy. Who would pay this levy? The hardware manufacturers, and through them – indirectly – us.

The death of DRM

Luckily, DRM is dying, at least in the download sphere. Napster’s Dan Nash believes that DRM-free is “the general way things are going”. In his opinion, record companies “have no choice but to adapt”; those that “stick to DRM on a pay-per-download basis will not remain competitive”.
In the US, Napster has joined Amazon in selling DRM-free content in MP3 format from all the major labels. Over here, online stores from Play.com and 7digital are already selling DRM-free content from EMI, while 7digital has also become the first European store to win Warner Bros’ substantial catalogue DRM-free. The remaining major labels, Universal and Sony BMG, are widely expected to follow. With a UK version of Amazon’s DRM-free store set to launch this year, and a rival effort from Tesco expected shortly, things are looking up. According to Simon Wheeler, chairman of the independent record industry body AIM’s new media committee, DRM’s demise is inevitable. The only thing holding it back is “the amount of time it’s taking for the deals to be done, and probably the size of that up-front cheque”.

Going DRM-free makes sense not just for consumers, but for the industry. Deutche Telekom says three out of four technical support calls its Musicload service had to deal with were the result of DRM. And when it offered a DRM-free option to artists they saw a 40% increase in sales.

That said, the future still isn’t entirely DRM-free. “For rental, or subscription, or whatever the model is that develops, there needs to be some sort of DRM to track usage,” said Wheeler. Dan Nash agrees. That’s hardly unreasonable; you can’t expect to copy tracks willy-nilly when they’re being rented. What you can and should expect is that DRM won’t get in the way of you doing what you’ve paid to do – enjoy the music you love.