DISQUS

Simon Willison · 3 years ago

Apple's DRM technology doesn't make it hard to play music on an iPod if it came from another store - it's the iPod's LACK of DRM software (for the Windows Media DRM format) that stops you from doing that. Purchased music that hasn't been crippled by DRM - for example, songs bought from cdbaby.com - will play on the iPod just fine.

Simon Willison · 3 years ago

Oops, magnatune.com is the site I meant, not cdbaby.

acdha · 3 years ago

As a long-time eMusic subscriber your comment about the iPod laughably wrong: I have literally thousands tracks of legally purchased music on my iPod and had to put no effort whatsoever to get it there. As Simon pointed out the only problem is that many companies chose to use DRM to make their offerings less useful for their paying customers - a poor business decision what has most of the major-label music stores fighting for the distant third place behind Apple and eMusic, not any nefarious action on Apple's part. This is also why CD sales remain strong: DRM-encumbered music costs as much as a CD but comes with significant restrictions and lower quality (ironically eMusic's files tend to be noticeably higher quality than the few tracks I've sampled on Real/Napster/etc.) - unsurprisingly the bulk of most collections is music which has been ripped from CDs.

(It's worth noting that my eMusic and Magnatune tracks are actually *easier* to get on an iPod than Apple's offerings since you have to login to the iTunes music store the first time you attempt to play ITMS tracks on a new machine while uncrippled MP3s just work...)

Matt Marshall · 3 years ago

Great context. And I forgot to mention eMusic, specifically, which is an interesting case.