So, if this article is correct – and it sounds true, particularly in the post-Steve Jobs era – then Apple Music is going to be pure death on anybody who has a digital music collection that is even slightly more than one standard deviation away from the norm. Short version, for anybody who doesn’t want to click through: sign up for Apple Music, and apparently the service will go through your digital library and start deleting files. …And that’s the problem with short versions of things, rather than reading the whole article: what’s happening is a lot more complexly ghastly than that (the author was particularly wroth over Apple deciding that anything recorded in .WAV should be copied as .Mp3), but you should read it and see for yourself.
The simple answer in all of this is ‘don’t join Apple Music,’ of course – but the problem is larger than that, hey? There seems to be a certain confusion today over whether consumers actually get to own the intellectual property (IP) that they consume. Actually, there’s not really any confusion there: entertainment vendors have carefully written up everything to make it clear that, no, the consumers don’t actually own said IP. It’s just that the consumers don’t actually realize this until something happens (see above) that punctures the bubble.
Mind you, I admit to a certain amount of sympathy for entertainment vendors. They’re not just motivated by corporate greed; they’re also motivated by corporate exasperation. There are a bunch of people out there who would rather almost starve than steal a loaf of bread, while at the same time thinking that there’s nothing particularly wrong with getting a bootleg copy of the latest hot song. That was one of the reasons why Prince was so aggressive about keeping his music off of Youtube and suchlike services; he felt, rightly or wrongly*, that this was the only way to make sure that Prince got paid properly for making his songs. This may or may not excuse the rather elaborate ways that we see IP access being folded, spindled, or mutilated – but it does explain it a bit.
Sorry: no easy answer here. The record companies suck, but they have their reasons to suck. Which doesn’t excuse them, but does make the picture grayer than I’d personally like. Welcome to the world…
(Via @alexhern)
Moe Lane
*I’m not sure if he was correct there, honestly. Half of my music purchases – and I purchase, deliberately, and as close to the source as I can – come from stuff I saw on Youtube. Contrariwise, I didn’t buy a single Prince album when the man was still alive (I grabbed three after he died).
Exasperation is one word, perhaps another is desperation?
I have friends who insist on owning CDs for this very reason(as well as “audio-quality” hipster-ism.)
There’s one major problem with that. CDs are made to degrade over time. About a quarter of the collection I’ve backed up by onto my computer is no longer readable.
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And yes, I would get *extremely* pissed off if some technology company took it upon itself to wipe my fair use copies from my hard drive.
My father the librarian laments the ethereal fragility of modern media. I tease the hipsters, but vinyl is both delightfully simple and structurally sound.
Vinyl also warps if it gets to hot, gets scratches and pops and skips, is relatively fragile and heavy.
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Source: used to have a couple hundred LPs
Most of that applies to CDs as well. When cared for they still lack the built-in entropy of CD de-lamination.
Still have a decent collection of albums and ’45s .. also have a good sized collection of CDs.
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So far, I haven’t seen noticeable CD degradation, even on the oldest disks, although the Sony copy-protection nonsense on the Billy Joel box set is kind of annoying because the disk won’t play in some car audio systems.
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Mew
This is why I still have a large collection of CDs and Bluray/DVDs. If I am spending good money to buy a product, I want to own it, not just long term rental.
I have never bought anything from Apple music….and do not use Itunes to organize my music for reasons like this..
Publishers would rather get $10 per month from you, every month, than $200 per year at random, unpredictable times. It’s one of the curses of quarterly earnings reports.
tl;dr – iCloud Music uploads and deletes your tracks, Apple Music and iTunes Match does not. Don’t use iCloud Music.
The guy is almost certainly confused about Apple Music, iTunes Match, and iCloud Music. Apple Music is a streaming service. I use it, and I have a large collection of CD rips, Amazon music, and original tracks. Everything is fine. iTunes Match scans your library, looking for non-Apple Store tracks, uploads and resamples them, and makes them available to any device logged in with your Apple ID. iCloud Music is Apple’s music storage option, and if enabled it will upload your tracks to iCloud and delete them from the device it found them on. Apple is explicit about this, and I’m sure it is meant to free up storage on your iDevice, But once you turn on iCloud Music, your music files go away and must be streamed (or explicitly downloaded from iCloud). I’ve never enabled iCloud Music because I listen to music in places without wifi.
I would say his complaint #2, that Apple replaces rare versions of songs with more common ones, is 100% legitimate. That would really annoy _me_, anyway.
This *alone* is enough reason to not use their “music services”. They want to go compete with Pandora, that’s fine.
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The root problem here isn’t even piracy, it’s the media company decision to treat all their customers with suspicion rather than focusing on making a better *product*.
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I will point out again that, circa 1960, the money for artists was in the *concerts*, not record sales.. perhaps media companies should embrace more better concerts for less than $250 a ticket?
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Mew
“I will point out again that, circa 1960, the money for artists was in the *concerts*, not record sales.. ”
As far as I know, that’s not only still the case, it’s probably even more so.
Complaint #2 should be enough to spark a class-action suit.
I will keep on buying compact discs until they no longer make them, and I don’t believe in mp3s. Why use a lossy format when everyone has enough room nowadays to store the wav files? My entire music collection takes up 300G and that isn’t a lot of room nowadays.
> store the wav files
You compress them to flac though, right? Still lossless and you have the added benefit of meta tag support like with mp3s
SOmething of a rebuttal to the original article.
http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it?utm_medium=slider&utm_campaign=navigation&utm_source=im
It’s an interesting article. Not least because the author apparently cannot even conceive of a situation where somebody might be dealing with Apple Music while using a PC. 🙂
Fair cop, but his point stands if you change every “primary Mac” reference to say “primary computer.”
True, although I wonder whether Apple Music has different protocols on PCs.
So, it’s basically just like the South Park episode where Kyle didn’t read the Terms of Use agreement and got turned into a human centipede?