This post by Om depressed me a bit. Key quote:
They (which includes everyone from Microsoft to Real to SanDisk) used to mock Apple for having a walled garden approach to digital music. iPod + iTunes + Apple DRM = Money. Well now they are building their own walls - Microsoft has Zune.
This smells like the Prodigy, Compuserv, AOL trend of the early 90’s. Competing walled gardens in an arms race over content and price. None of which offered the value of internet-only ISPs.
So, where does a company like eMusic fit into this analogy? eMusic is still a walled garden because they do not offer the full spectrum of artists. But, it’s significantly more open and less offensive than the rest of the walled gardens because there are no nasty DRMs involved, so you can take the music you purchase at eMusic and play it in iTunes or Zune or whatever. So, in my analogy, eMusic is not an open ISP, but they’re not as bad as the traditional walled gardens like AOL and Co.
Based on this analysis I’m saying that no music service will ever be truely open until you are able to purchase all music from all sources on it. I think that’s fair criteria for a truely open system, but I don’t think it will happen anytime soon.
And does that make ad-based P2P piracy software = old-school, free NetZero? That’s a fun comparison. They’re both ad-based and both delivered a service for free that others tried to make you pay for… but, again not a perfect fit because there was nothing illegal about NetZero… it was just an unsustainable business model; whereas, KaZaa, Limewire died because they were illegal.
Well, I’m having too much fun beating this metaphor to death, but I am writing about it to illustrate a point. The old value-added ISP walled gardens were eventually overrun because of price and the closed nature of the network. I hope the same will hold true in the music download space.
My dream: someday, the pendulum will swing back, and all the companies Om described running to setup walled garden music download services will realize the error in their ways. We will see music download services with endless choices. It will be easy (and practically free) to become a content distributor on the service, just as free as setting up a website today. Open, DRM-free standards will be embraced: mp3. Music will be licensed and priced by the artist, but licenses will be simple in order to respect the consumers’ fair use rights.
But, isn’t the difference that the content AOL had turned out not to be better enough than what was available “for free”? That is, for things to really change it’s not just going to be about the closed vs. open model it’s going to be about a sea change in the way people find music (and movies) — it’s the labels and studios that drive Apple to be so restrictive with the DRM (the “closed” model is a different story, perhaps) because, for now, their content is what people want. Looking at YouTube, for instance, seems to indicate that we are, in fact, seeing a change where people are just as happy to be entertained by amateurs — by their peers — as they are by the big studios. eMusic and other sources of independent music point to a similar change being possible in music content, but until the RIAA crowd catches a clue (good luck waiting on that) or “we” stop giving them so much power by valuing the music they own more highly things aren’t going to change as significantly as they did when the open web made AOL’s model obsolete within a matter of a few years. Think of it in terms of substitutes — once the people who demand DRM no longer dominate ownership of the content people want, they will lose their power and, thus, their ability to force DRM down our throats. Long live peer publishing.