Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Hark!  Hear the news!  EMI’s entire music catalog will become available without DRM and will be encoded at a higher quality for thirty cents more per track.  Come May, I will definitely be buying from iTunes to show my support.  Apple’s new deal with EMI is a step in the right direction, a step away from artificial exclusivity and monopolization.

When I look at the present state of online music, I am strangely reminded of the Great Browser Wars of the late 1990s.  To refresh those of you who either weren’t there or just didn’t care, the Browser Wars were a pitched and vicious battle fought mainly betwixt Microsoft and Netscape.  Netscape was the unquestionable leader in the early browser market and Microsoft wanted in.  Microsoft eventually won by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and establishing total market saturation, but before that point came, the two companies tried to outdo each other with exclusive features.  Things like integrated e-mail, Java implementations, the blink tag, and other browser-specific, nonstandard features took priority over fixing an increasingly buggy and broken Web.  Only over the past five years or so has there been any real emphasis on making the web workable for every browser, and whether you realize it or not, we have all benefited tremendously from the change in focus.

There are obvious parallels in online music today.   Apple, like Netscape, was the first company to create a hugely successful product in a new domain.  Unlike Netscape, they have retained unshakable market dominance.  Just like the Browser Wars, competition has been subtley shifting toward feature exclusivity.  Again, Apple largely wins this one on content, so competing companies have been appealing to the record labels with all sorts of novel DRM schemes.  Now we are beginning to see this misguided feature-philosophy creep directly into the consumer experience.

I wrote yesterday about Elliott Yamin’s new CD.  I like it very much and I think you should all buy a copy.  The CD has eleven tracks on it.  No, wait, did I say eleven?  I meant twenty-one.  Trouble is, to get all the bonus tracks I’ll have to whore around with six different online retailers and keep six different music players handy to listen to them.  This is the result of companies trying to compete on the basis of “exclusive features.”  Each online store has a different pair of bonus songs on offer, none of which can be obtained from the standard physical CD.  Elliott should be furious with his record label, because they’re screwing his fans and damaging his debut.  This is different from, say, being able to get the CD earlier from Target than I could from Virgin, or getting a pre-release track if I subscribe to a certain magazine.  In this case I can’t listen to literally half the songs he recorded for his debut album because of this crazy ploy.  It’s as if they’ve released six different versions of the CD.  That’s ludicrous.

When companies try to compete on the basis of exclusivity everyone loses.  I have been turned into a shafted, angry consumer over this, and my wallet has closed up like a frightened clam.  An open, DRM-free, fully interpolable future is the only one where consumers will be happy, and happy consumers spend money.  EMI?  A step in the right direction.