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).
