FREE YOUR MIND, AND THE MUSIC WILL FOLLOW
By Carrington Vanston - September 10, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/freeyourmind

Oh Real Networks, you silly thing. You state in your most recent press release that you've sold a "record 3 million songs" during your three-week music sale. And that wasn't a lie. Oh no. Not at all.

By "record," of course, you just mean "personal best." You don't mean "record" in the sense of an actual record or anything wacky like that. Apple's latest numbers, for instance, show that it's selling songs at over three times that rate (and at twice the cost). But you dropped your prices so you were losing money on each sale, and you achieved your own personal highest sales (and, I presume, highest loss) ever.

You lost money on each sale, but you tried valiantly to make up in volume. You did your best, and for that I applaud you.

When you, my sweet, claim that "music fans who want choice are turning to Real," that is not a lie either. It is clear that by "choice" you aren't talking about amount of music available; after all, you offer far fewer songs than are available on rival services, and only a small fraction of the songs available from shops in the big scary Real World.

You also, dear heart, state that you "are the only place consumers can buy music and enjoy it on any popular portable device."

That is not a lie. You simply are not counting regular old MP3s or any other format that isn't hobbled by an asinine, restrictive Digital Rights Management scheme. Oh, and you were pressed for time and just didn't get around to mentioning that I can burn any songs I buy from the iTunes music store and import them with no DRM restrictions at all. You weren't lying, you just have poor time management.

Please note, my lovely, that I'm not endorsing Apple's DRM over yours. All DRM is equally insulting and we should fight it tooth and nail. And crowbar. But that means I don't endorse your highly restrictive DRM-shackled music files either.

And I realize, my pet, that when you claim to be the "only place" to buy music compatible with any portable player you were only considering rival online music file resellers. I'm sure it's an honest mistake, not a lie, that you have forgotten to include the many thousands of local music stores plus the huge number of small and large online retailers who sell a quaint old product called a compact disc.

Those are also called CDs, in case you're unfamiliar with the term.

To bring you up to speed with the cool kids, a CD is a music file distribution format that offers far higher quality sampling than available from online stores like the iTunes music store and your own "digital discount bin" establishment. Music on these CDs has no Digital Rights Management in place to interfere with fair and reasonable use of the music, including placing copies on absolutely any portable music player ranging from the iPod to the oldest cassette walkman to something amazing that hasn't even been invented yet.

You know, given all the many advantages a CD has over online music files, I'm starting to think these CD things could really take off.

And so, my pooky-bear, I want to conclude this billet-doux with a little advice. It's unbecoming of you to so loudly proclaim the values of choice and purchaser freedom when you do not have, let's be honest, a great track record when it comes to such things yourself. Must I bring up the hidden and deceptive links to the free version of your Real Player software?

Now now, before you object and embarrass us both, let me just say that any true champion of consumer choice would not have struggled to invent something like Harmoney to shoe-horn her own DRM-restricted files onto other people's iPods. Instead, a champion of choice would have simply sold DRM-free music or posted a page with instructions on how to strip away the DRM and free the music.

Hmmm, "free the music." That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]