feedMusic, not just for christmas
October 18, 2007 | 
co.mments
"Rubin envisions a model where you subscribe to the whole universe of music for say $20/month, and all the labels have to agree on how to carve up the business. John argues that this would imply DRM, because you could sign up for a month, download everything, unsubscribe, and (although John doesn’t suggest this) publish it on a server in Russia.That’s a straw man, though, because Rubin’s idea almost entirely misses the mark. I don’t want to subscribe to the universe, I want to subscribe to a few individual artists, and maybe a particular DJ’s selections, or maybe an affinity group."
Everyone's missing the mark it seems. I suspect this an intellectual argument about rights, that misses the important point - owning digital music sucks. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to own music, I want to listen to it. Happily pay for that. As long as the music can find me, anywhere on anything, I'm golden. The cost of owning music is best explained by Mark Pilgrim:
"But it’s not enough. I’m creating a lot of data, and I want to keep most of it for the rest of my life. This includes video of my children growing up, but also things like video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2004, I generated 35 GB of such data. In 2005, I generated just shy of 150 GB. This year I’m on track to generate about 100 GB. I foresee doing this for about 20 more years, and then maintaining the archive for another 30 years after that. After that I’ll be dead and it will be Somebody Else’s Problem."
That's insane. Why would I want to do that? Here's the problem - I already am. Granted at lower volumes than Mark, but I more or less have a hacked up, unreliable data center. For one family - a datacenter. I spent ~10 hours over a weekend during September just sorting out music. And I get paid to program. Some of my non-tech friends have more volume than me (more photo and video); they've got everything on a DELL or a USB drive. Part of me thinks they were better off with vinyl albums and photos in shoeboxes.
October 18, 2007 09:04 AM