Total Music, Uh-Huh

Friday, 12 October 2007

BusinessWeek has a story — “Universal Music Takes on iTunes”¹ — regarding a supposed proposal from Universal Music chief Doug Morris to create a music-industry-owned subscription service called Total Music. BusinessWeek twists the story into pretzel-like contortions to present this scheme as clever and reasonable.

While the details are in flux, insiders say Morris & Co. have an intriguing business model: get hardware makers or cell carriers to absorb the cost of a roughly $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with all-you-can-eat music that’s essentially free.

So hardware makers will “absorb the cost”, rather than passing the cost along to consumers. Uh-huh.

Music companies would collect the subscription fee, while hardware makers theoretically would move many more players. “Doug is doing the right thing taking on Steve Jobs,” says ex-MCA Records Chairman Irving Azoff, whose Azoff Music Management Group represents the Eagles, Journey, Christina Aguilera, and others. “The artists are behind him.”

So artists love the music labels. And it’s taking on not Apple Inc. but “Steve Jobs”, personally. Uh-huh. (Good rule of thumb: the more an article attributes an Apple product or service to Steve Jobs personally, the more likely it’s a hatchet job.)

In August, Morris announced a five-month test with Wal-Mart, Google, and Best Buy. The three companies will sell music downloads that can be played on any device — a freedom not available to buyers of iTunes songs, most of which play only on Apple devices and software.

Wrong. That freedom is available to buyers of iTunes songs, in the form of Apple’s DRM-free iTunes Plus, which Universal Music has chosen not to sell. I.e. that Universal Music sold through iTunes only plays on iPods is Universal’s decision, not Apple’s. I’m not arguing that iTunes Plus is perfect — it kind of sucks, for one thing, that the price is higher than with iTunes’s “regular” DRM-laden tracks — but BusinessWeek is clearly insinuating that Universal can’t sell DRM-free music through iTunes, when in fact they can.

The hypocrisy here is running thick. If this Total Music subscription service ever sees the light of day, it almost certainly will entail the use of DRM — otherwise there’d be nothing to stop non-Total Music devices, for which the music industry received no fee, from playing the music downloaded from the service. No word from BusinessWeek on what DRM system the music industry plans to use, nor whether it’ll be compatible with any music playing devices already on the market.

The big question is whether the makers of music players and phones can charge enough to cover the cost of baking in the subscription. Under one scenario industry insiders figure the cost per player would amount to about $90. They arrived at that number by assuming people hang on to a music player or phone for 18 months before upgrading. Eighteen times a $5 subscription fee equals $90.

Thank you for performing the basic arithmetic for me.

So, apparently, this $90 is going to appear out of thin air. Most popular music players sell for around $150 or less. Many low-end players, like the iPod Shuffle and Sansa Express, retail for significantly less than $90. Either device makers are going to lose money, lots of money, on each unit sold, or else they’re going to raise the price of their players by $90. Guess which one is going to happen. But BusinessWeek claims this music, from the consumer’s perspective, will be “essentially free” and the cost will be “absorbed” by the device makers and mobile phone carriers.

No word on what happens when the 18 months are over. My guess is that your music stops working unless you start paying for a monthly subscription, or you buy another “Total Music” player and throw your old one out.

There is precedent here. When Microsoft was looking to launch a subscription service for Zune, Morris played hardball. He got the tech giant to fork over $1 for every player sold, plus royalties. Total Music would take that concept even further.

So, a 90-fold increase has “precedent” in a one dollar per unit fee. Uh-huh.

In and of itself, Total Music is not a ridiculous notion, just like regular pay-by-the-month subscription services aren’t ridiculous notions. But we all know that device makers aren’t going to eat the cost — they’re going to pass it along to consumers. A Total Music music player is going to cost somewhere around $100 more than a similar player without Total Music. And it’s not like subscription services haven’t been tried before.

So what this boils down to is BusinessWeek hailing Doug Morris as genius for coming up with the idea of a pre-paid subscription service.  ★

The ‘Un’ in ‘Unsupported’

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

I think I finally understand a certain misguided mindset that I’ve been baffled by for a decade. This mindset is exemplified by the sort of person who thinks that Apple “screwed them over” with the release of the iPhone 1.1.1 update.

The mindset manifests in many forms, but what it boils down to is this: a sense of entitlement that users should be able to do unsupported things and yet still be supported. That it makes no sense to expect support after taking unsupported actions is why I’ve found it baffling.

Here’s what I’ve figured out: the root cause of this is a wrongheaded notion about the nature of software. Because that’s what most of these issues boil down to: software. There is no limit to the depths of idiocy, so of course there are exceptions, but, for the most part, few reasonable people expect support after making unsupported hardware changes to a device.

With hardware, the constraints are visible. The limitations of what is supported and unsupported are issues of can’t: if, say, you replace the processor in your Mac, and it fails, what could Apple do? The machine itself can’t undo the processor swap you performed.

With software, though, the constraints are invisible and arbitrary. The limitations regarding what is and is not supported are issues of won’t rather than can’t. Right now, today, Apple could choose to support, either officially or tacitly, the development and installation of third-party iPhone software. They have chosen not to.

That this support decision is perhaps based on nothing more than marketing rather than being rooted in the laws of physics doesn’t change the fact that the decision was made — and that the decision as to what is supported and what is not lies with the vendor, not the customer.

This goes for iPhone SIM unlocks. On Mac OS X, this goes for unsupported system extensions like input managers and haxies, and for doing things like replacing the current version of a kernel extension or other system component with an older version from a previous release of Mac OS X because you read on MacFixIt that it works. You can do these things. You may well find them useful. You may well consider them essential to satisfy your own desires. But when you do these things, you are assuming responsibility for any adverse effects caused by them, now or in the future.

The point isn’t that you shouldn’t hack, or that you don’t have the right to do whatever you want with something you own. The point is that if you hack, you’re on your own. You can’t do unsupported things and expect to be supported for them just because you think these actions should be supported. It’s that simple. ★

Cancel Computer

Friday, 5 October 2007

Leo Laporte plays the “what if” game with the iPhone, more or less asking why anyone would buy a computer that didn’t support user-installable applications and was locked to one particular commercial network. He’s correct insofar as that the iPhone is, technically, a computer. And Apple could promote it as such. And, if they did, many of us — where by “us” I mean people like Leo, and me, and you, a reader of a site as nerdy as Daring Fireball — would be delighted.

But here’s the thing: Apple isn’t selling or promoting the iPhone as a general purpose handheld computer. So, much like with Macworld’s Rob Griffiths’s what does Apple want us to do if we want to develop and install third-party apps, buy another brand of smartphone? question, the answer really is that the iPhone, as of today, isn’t for you if you feel you must be able to install and modify software on it. There are all sorts of other devices that are, at heart, technically, computers, but which aren’t sold or promoted or marketed as such. Like say, TiVos. And iPods.

What’s different and weird and, I think, unique about the iPhone is that for a few weeks before the release of the 1.1.1 update, we got a taste of what the iPhone could be like as an open computing platform. But the fact that clever iPhone hackers figured out how to do it with the 1.0.x iPhone software in no way obligated Apple to support these techniques going forward.

Laporte asks:

What if the company that made the computer sent down an update that checked to see if you had installed your own applications and deleted them if so?

This is a common sentiment regarding the 1.1.1 update — that it deletes third-party applications. That’s not a fair description, though. All iPhone updates, including the earlier 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates, are installed as complete clean installations of the entire system. One of the advantages of a closed system is that it’s far easier to create upgrades for — a “just wipe the whole system clean and re-install the new one from scratch” installer is far easier to write than a “let’s carefully update only those files that are new and leave everything else, including third-party stuff we don’t even know about, in place” installer.

To argue that Apple should have left third-party apps and hacks installed is to argue that Apple should have expended some amount of engineering resources to support something they neither endorsed nor encouraged in the first place. You can argue that they should have done it anyway, on the grounds that it would have made iPhone hacking enthusiasts happy, but this line of argument logically leads all the way back to arguing that Apple should be endorsing, at least tacitly, the use of the iPhone as a general-purpose handheld computer.

Clearly Apple knew that the 1.1.1 update would remove any additional or modified iPhone software, and that it would block existing methods of restoring them. But, just as clearly, everyone involved with iPhone hacking, from the developers writing iPhone apps to the users installing them, was fully aware that this was going on through subversion.

Laporte:

Would you ever trust a company like that again?

That’s the wrong conclusion to draw from the 1.1.1 update. Frustrating? Disappointing? Sure. Foolish? Time will tell. But nefarious, dishonest, or even at all surprising? Not in the least. If anything, the lesson to be drawn is that Apple is quite trustworthy — iPhone 1.1.1 is and does exactly what Apple has claimed the iPhone is and does. To be trustworthy is to do what you say you will do; to do whatever someone else wishes you to do is to be obsequious.

Laporte draws a second analogy to a purchased cow:

Let’s say you’re selling me a cow. You tell me that that cow is being sold for the express purpose of making milk. I agree, and buy the cow.

Later I decide that I’d prefer to make cheese. You say that’s a violation of our agreement and kill my cow.

But that’s not fair at all. Apple didn’t kill or damage a single unlocked iPhone. They released a new software update which iPhone users had to agree to install, which could only be done after acknowledging a very strongly-worded warning stating that the update might render unlocked iPhones inoperable. The 1.1.1 update is not mandatory. Unlocked iPhones running the 1.0.2 software work as well today as they did a week ago.

It’s hard to work the concept of a “software update” into a cow analogy, but here goes: You willingly purchase a cow, which, the purveyor of said cow makes explicitly clear, is intended only to be used to produce milk. You buy it and figure out a way to make cheese. Two months later the purveyor of the cow offers you a pill, free of charge, which, if administered to the cow, will result in slightly better-tasting milk, but which pill comes with a stern and plainly worded warning that, if administered to a cow that had been used to produce cheese (which, recall, was made clear from the outset the cow was not intended for), the pill might kill the cow, and that, even if it doesn’t kill the cow, will prevent all previously known cheese-making hacks from working. Further, let’s stipulate that there is no medical or bovine pharmacological reason the pill could not have instead been engineered in such a way that it would enable the cow to produce the better-tasting milk and still allow the previously discovered cheese-producing hacks to continue unabated — that the reason for this frustrating limitation is, at best, marketing, and at worst, spite — and so that, in some way, the whole situation is, undeniably, at least somewhat shitty.

Regardless how strenuously you disagree with the decisions that led the upgrade pill to be engineered in this way, and with the anti-cheese-making restriction in the first place, the pill is what it is, and if you choose to administer this pill to your hacked-to-produce-cheese cow, it does not amount to the purveyor of said cow coming into your barn and killing it. It amounts to you killing your cow.

(And, again, for the record, your humble analogy-stretcher is himself quite enamored with the idea of allowing these clever cows to produce cheese.) ★