Eye of Pod

[tfabris]

We're on iTunes now, too. Does that mean we've "arrived"?

I feel obligated to point out that if you own a portable music player other than an iPod, odds are you won't be able to play those DRM-protected songs on it, while CDBaby provides unencumbered MP3s that will play on anything.

On the other hand, Apple is the only company that makes, or has ever made, a portable music player, so it doesn't matter, right?

Comments

[tollermom]

Just FYI, there's no limit on the number of iPods you can load Apple DRMed songs onto. You can only have five _computers_ authorized at once to play your Apple DRMed songs, but if you forget to deauthorize old ones (or can't, 'cause they crashed dead before you could), you can have iTunes deauthorize everything and then you just reauth and start over again (I had to do this a few months ago).

Not that you probably care, since you don't do iTunes/iPods/whatever, but I felt compelled to clarify.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Ah, right, I had the "five" limitation backwards with regard to which piece of client hardware it was related to. Still, same difference: Hardware devices are transitory and last only a few years at best. Music (or any artistic media) is forever.

Tying your purchase to a specific piece of playback hardware (or five specific pieces of hardware), regardless of whether or not you offer a remediation procedure in the event of hardware failure, goes against a lifetime of conditioning that's taught me to expect media that can be moved from player to player without having to untie it from a previous player.

Of course, digital distribution completely breaks the mold upon which that conditioning was based, so that conditioning is entirely inappropriate in today's world. Still hard to get around it. "These kids today" are growing up in a world where that sort of thing is commonplace and they probably won't mind it at all.