Why skepticism's healthy

Yesterday I received a press release for YourFreeMusicDownloads.com, which appeared to be a ad-based legal music download site. It seemed interesting, so I visited the site.

I tried looking at the new releases, the downloads available, and the catalogue, but all required registration before showing any information. This is a marked contrast to Rhapsody.com, which lets you look through various playlists to check out the variety of their content before requiring registration.

Frustrated at the lack of information, I opened up YourFreeMusicDowload's Terms of Use. That's where things got interesting.

According to the press release,

Your Free Music Downloads.com does not embed ads within the music or before or after each selection. Instead, when registering, users are simply asked to complete a short survey that generates revenue for Your Free Music Downloads.com.

- Seems straightforward enough.

The first clause of the Terms of Use require registration -- fair enough. The second, though, says:

You must tell two or more friends about our website. You must only enter the names and email addresses of people you know and who trust and accept email from you.

- Not mentioned in the press release. Personally, warning bells always go off when I'm required to sell to friends.

While the press release talks about a "short survey," the fifth clause of the Terms of Use gets to the meat of the matter.

5. Verification of Sponsor Offer Participation. Each Sponsor must provide written verification to Your Free Music Downloads.com that you have successfully qualified for and completed that Sponsor's offer. Following Your Free Music Downloads.com receipt of such verification from the last of the requisite number of Sponsors, Your Free Music Downloads.com will send an email message to you asking you to confirm your account registration. The qualification time varies by Sponsor, but may take up to 30 days. In some cases an additional step by you is required to satisfy the Sponsor's qualifications. By way of example... a Sponsor offer for a credit card... may require you to use the credit card to make a purchase, take a cash advance, or transfer a balance, to satisfy the Sponsor's qualifications.

- So in order to get "free" MP3s, you have to accept the promotional offers from several sponsors. In other words, you have to receive and use a credit card, spend money purchasing products, and so on in order for your registration to be validated.

And notice that "Each sponsor music provide...verification" before you have access to the catalog. Based on the language, if you don't participate in all the offers, your registration is invalidated, and no free music for you!

After reading the Terms of Use, I googled "yourfreemusicdownloads" and found, amidst the many repostings of the press release, an article from Wired that confirmed my suspicions.

The moral of this little tale? A little bit of research can save you a whole lot of trouble. It only took me about four minutes to go from reading the initial press release to finding the Wired article. Look before you leap (or click).

- Ralph

The RIAA and the Sam's Club Weenie

When the RIAA trots out figures showing how much money they've lost to illegal downloads, there's an unspoken assumption folded into those figures that make them far bigger than they should be.

It's the driving force behind the RIAA's war on consumers that's hauling computer-ignorant grandmas and even dead people into court as vicious intellectual pirates. It's behind Universal's one dollar tariff on every Zune player Microsoft sells, and the current efforts of the SoundExchange to hobble webcasters. It's the reason why record companies continue to force copy protection on consumers that do little more than punish legitimate customers.

And it's an assumption Sam's Club never makes.

The assumption: Every free sample represents another lost sale.

Go to the food section of any Sam's Club and you're likely to find one or two employees offering free samples. Usually, the freebies are some kind of impulse item, such as cocktail weenies.

Sam's Club, and its parent company WalMart, are famous for being ruthless about the bottom line. They operate on very thin margins, so if something's not working -- and working well -- then out it goes.

Free food samples at Sam's Club have been a fixture for years, so obviously they work well. And why not? Take one bag of 100 cocktail weenies out of stock (wholesale price, $4.50) and cook 'em up. One hundred shoppers receive one sample each. If just one in five people picked up a bag, that's $179.80 in sales (at $8.99 a bag).

And those 100 weenies generate other sales as well. The smell of cooking weenies will make some shoppers hungry, and cause them to purchase some food items when they were just planning on picking up some toilet paper in bulk. Further, of those who sampled a weenie but didn't purchase at that time, some will go back to Sam's Club at a later time for a bag or two when they're hosting a party (I have).

From Sam's Club viewpoint, giving out 100 cocktail weenies generates more than enough revenue to justify the loss. After all, giving up $4.50 to net 40 times that amount is a good deal just about anywhere.

But that's not how the RIAA would see it. If 100 people each ate a free weenie and only 20 bags were sold, then 80 people didn't purchase bags and therefore the RIAA suffered $719.20 in lost revenue.
As Sam's Club knows, not everyone who accepts a free weenie will purchase. If they charged a nickel a weenie, there would be fewer takers. If it's something that's not important to you, you might be willing to try it no risk (that is, for free) but certainly not if there's any money or effort involved.

If the RIAA would recognize that free samples are an important part of their business, we'd all be a lot better off. A good portion of the stuff being downloaded for free is only of interest because it is free. I'm willing to bet a lot of Top 40 MP3's wind up deleted once the novelty wears off.

Sam's Club uses free samples effectively to generate sales. The RIAA's maniac drive to lock down every possible usage of its material only hurts itself. Free weenies are good for business.

The RIAA should realize that -- and quit being such a weenie.

- Ralph

The RIAA and Wimpy WiFi - Part 2

Let's review: what most people want in a WiFi-enabled MP3 player is pretty straightforward. They want a player with similar capabilities to a cellphone, or a laptop. It should be able to access the Internet through hotspots. It should be able to send files back and forth to other WiFi-enabled devices, and perhaps sync wirelessly with a PC.

Here's the thing -- whoever delivers such a device will make a fortune. In the meantime, however, the RIAA relentlessly continues to stop, or at least slow down, the market's move to the digital domain.

The Sansa CONNECT is a step closer, but its still not there. Developed in conjuction with Yahoo!, the CONNECT has some wireless capability. It's limited, but certainly more open than the Zune.

The CONNECT can access any open WiFi hotspot (one step forward), but can only access Yahoo! (one step back), and only if you subscribe to Yahoo!'s music service (another step back).

You can listen to Internet radio with the player (one step forward), but only those associated with Yahoo! Music (one step back). You can't wirelessly sync the CONNECT (one step back), but it does have an SD memory card slot so you can actually expand the player's memory (one step forward).

If you subscribe to Yahoo!'s music service, then the CONNECT is a great player. Of course, you can't share music with other WiFi devices (one step back), but at least you have access to a lot of music. It's a start, and it will probably do well. But if Sansa were to deliver the WiFi-enabled MP3 player everyone wants, how much more successful could it be?

- Ralph

The RIAA and Wimpy WiFi - Part 1

I've talked before about the fundamental disconnect between the RIAA and music consumers. Instead of responding to market demands and profiting from providing customers with what they want, the major labels keep trying to push customers back into buying patterns they've long since abandoned.

For many consumers, WiFi capability is the next logical step for MP3 players. The expectation was that a WiFi-enabled MP3 player would have similar capabilities to a cellphone, or a laptop. That is, access through hotspots, the ability to send files back and forth to other WiFi-enabled devices, perhaps the ability to sync wirelessly.

Enter the Microsoft Zune -- a digital music player with wireless capability. But the major labels had something to say about that. The result was a device crippled almost to uselessness by Digital Rights Management (DRM) -- and a system that rigorously protects the property of the major labels while trampling the rights of others.

Is the Zune wireless? Technically, but Zunes can only communicate wirelessly with other Zunes (that's what "Welcome to the social" refers to -- we'll save the discussion about referencing early 2oth century church ice cream socials in a misguided attempt at hipster coolness for another day). A far cry from true WiFi.

And while you can transfer songs from one Zune to another, the process adds DRM to the file. Send a song to a friend and they can listen to the track three times before it automatically disables itself -- and they better listen promptly, because the track self-destructs after three days whether its played or not.

This was about the only way the major labels would let Microsoft have any kind of wireless capability. But the problem is that this DRM is added to everything transferred from one Zune another. DRM-free songs bands post on their website for fans to share gets this DRM added, even though the bands are against DRM. Podcasts issued with creative commons licenses get this DRM added -- in violation of the terms of use of the creative commons license.

The RIAA has been happy to sue anyone and everyone who crosses their path. Wouldn't it be interesting if creative commons licensors collectively brought suit against the Zune's violation of their rights?

- Ralph

The RIAA and the polyphonic pirate

Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music (a key member of the RIAA), there's only one way to think of MP3 players.

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they [the users] all know it."

I took a look at what's on my iPod to see how much truth there was in Mr. Morris' allegation on a personal level. I currently store about 3,800 tracks on my 20GB iPod (have to save some room for podcasts, you know). Of those tracks, I have approximately 450 tracks legally downloaded directly from independent artist and label websites. None of these are RIAA members.

I have 411 classical selections, pulled from 263 different CDs in my possession. Only 60 of those CDs are from RIAA members, or about 22%..

Of the remaining songs (about 2,900), I've pulled selections from 425 albums, of which 260 are from RIAA member labels. So approximately 120 classical tracks and 1,450 songs are from RIAA member labels, or roughly 41% of my iPod's content.

And where did those albums come from? My own collection. Some I purchased new, some used, some I picked up at trade shows.

So one might conclude that Mr. Morris is wrong and my iPod is hardly "a repository of stolen music." And the RIAA position in testimony before the Supreme Court in 2005 would agree.

"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."

Fast forward to 2006, though, and the RIAA sings a different DRM-protected tune:

"Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization.

Translation: Unless you get permission from the record companies, ripping CDs to a computer is not considered fair use, and is therefore unauthorized copying.

A simple shift of semantics has turned me from good citizen to desperate criminal. Shiver me timbers! But to confuse the issue even further, according to the RIAA's own website:

"If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail."

So perhaps I'm not such a blackguard after all -- for the moment.

- Ralph

The Gift of Sony

Let's continue our stroll through a big box retailer's flyer. Next to the TiVo® DVR is the Sony S2 1GB Sports® Walkman® MP3 player. For someone who runs, walks or otherwise works out, this could be a great gift. It uses embedded memory, so there's no moving parts to jostle.

One gigabyte is enough room to store a decent amount of music -- especially if the device is used primarily for workouts. The S2 also has an FM tuner, and some exercise-oriented features, such as a pedometer, stopwatch and calorie counter.

So is it a stand-alone or a contextural gift?

It could be considered stand-alone. You can take it out the box, turn on the FM tuner and go for a job. When we look at the digital music side of it, though, it becomes contextural -- and in a way that gives most people headaches.

According to the specs, the S2 plays "MP3, ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus™, WMA(non-DRM), AAC (non-DRM)." If you're not familiar with the byzantine workings of Digital Rights Management (DRM), you can be creating a lot of work for your gift recipient. Let's break it down.

MP3 format is the one format just about any player can use. CDs transferred to your computer from your personal collection can be saved in this form (if the CDs don't have some kind of malicious DRM). Many bands on MySpace and other websites also use this format.

ATRAC3 is a Sony format that they've unsuccessfully tried to force on the public. For a while Sony digital music players ONLY played ATRAC files, requiring you to convert everything to this format in a long, slow transfer process. The Sony CONNECT™ Music online store uses this format -- which is why you can't use songs bought from CONNECT on other brands of players -- only Sony players can play ATRAC files.

WMA files are Microsoft's proprietary answer to the MP3 format. WMA files can be played on any Windows-based player, which is just about everyone except Apple. Music purchased from most online music stores are "protected" WMA files, which means they have DRM added to limit their use.

AAC format is the one used by Apple, and is the format songs purchased from the iTunes store come in. As with other online stores, DRM is added to the files to limit thier usage.

Note that the S2 can play non-DRM WMA and AAC files. What does that mean? It can't play any files in those formats if the songs were purchased from an online music store. Here's another little twist. While Sony's grudgingly allowed MP3 files onto their players, all other file formats have to be converted to ATRAC3 before they can be transferred to the player.

This is why only non-DRM WMA and AAC files can be used. The DRM prevents file format conversion (or at least makes it inconvinient). If the recipient has a lot of music purchased from iTunes,http://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif they will not be able to use them with the S2. If they prefer Windows Media Player and have bought songs from Napster, URGE, Rhapsody and most of the other online stores, those songs also will be incompatible.

This is a heavily contextural gift. If the recipient hasn't really gotten into digital music and exercises, the S2 would be a great choice. If they already download a lot of music, it might be better to consider another embedded memory player that's compatible with the bulk of their library -- either the iPod shuffle if their iTunes customers, or perhaps a Creative Labs Zen V if they're not.

And finally, running down Ken's shopping rules:
#1 - If they specifically as for the S2 Sports Walkman, get it. If not, do some research about what format their digital music's already in.
#2 - Sony's name denotes a family of products -- not just the old portable cassette player. Make sure you've got the right "Sony Walkman"
#3 - The S2 is very reasonably priced (about $120) especially now that its on sale.

- Ralph

Shopping made easy.

Good point about the decision-making process that should go into buying an MP3 player, Ralph. Only problem with that is that I doubt many people do it.

Think about it for a moment. Most people buying an MP3 player as a gift are going to consider three things:

1. What the person asked for.
2. What they've heard of.
3. What they can afford.

Guess who wins? Hint -- it's named after a fruit.

Seriously, iPods are "cool" -- people want them (#1). Everybody's heard of them, even your 78-year old grandmother (#2). They come at a lot of different price points (#3).
Can gift-giving get any easier? That's not an endorsement of iPods -- just a look at reality.

And by the way, what about this statement: "Buy something with a hard drive for someone into running track, and you're giving them a player that will soon be on the fritz." Sounds like a generalization to me -- got some supporting evidence that the HDD in iPods doesn't hold up?

On the subject of memes, I hope Orange County can turn it around. Maybe the band can learn that Chumbawamba song, "I get knocked down, but I get up again..."

On second thought, better not.

Ken