Roland Tanglao's Weblog

UPDATE: thanks for the link Nseries WOM World. For the record, I think the Nokia Music store could be successful if they sold non DRM'ed music. 

DRM s*cks! Apple's Fairplay s*cks! WMA DRM s*cks! The market has spoken and Apple's DRM has won. WMA DRM is dead and in the long run so is Fairplay (un DRM'ed music is the future!) so launching a music store based on DRM is folly. I want Nokia to be successful but basing a music store in 2007 on Microsoft's DRM is wrong. Hopefully Nokia will drop the Windows DRM and start selling un DRM'ed music real soon now.

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N-Gage and WMA music downloads – i.e., this has all the signs of being a dud. As I see it, the only thing going for it is PayPal support.

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Read the whole thing (via Brian Lamb's excellent piece July/August 2007 Educause Review which is also definitely worth reading)

FROM "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem (Harper's Magazine):

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Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.

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Amen brother! Preachit!

FROM A VC: What The RIAA Needs To Do:

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The RIAA is screwing up the music business. Their hatred of Napster has led to a jihad on free mp3s that is slowly but surely killing the music business. The major labels will continue to merge, consolidate, and put out increasingly irrelevant music.

Something needs to change and this is what needs to happen. The RIAA needs to drop its fight against free mp3s. They need to accept that music sold online needs to be as portable as music sold offline is.

I mean how stupid is it to continue to sell CDs with no copy protection on them but to DRM the hell out of online music. It's forcing people like me who consume all of our music online to buy our music encased in plastic! It's dumb, anti-consumer, and it has to stop.

The RIAA needs to accept that some proportion of their customer base will consume pirated music. They need to just eat that as the cost of doing business.

They need to focus on the majority of music consumers who will pay for music, but want a better deal, and want the music portable so they can play it wherever they want.

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Amen! Go Derek and other enlightened Canadian musicians (like Colin) go!

FROM Penmachine.com: Canadian musicians rock! | Derek K. Miller, Writer & Editor, Vancouver, Canada:

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The Canadian Music Creators Coalition—which includes Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Stars, Raine Maida, Dave Bidini, Billy Talent, John K. Samson, Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Andrew Cash, and Bob Wiseman—is exactly the right idea:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical
2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive
3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

Rock on. I'm signing up myself.

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