Yesterday, Nokia announced a new initiative, Comes With Music, that will offer "free" music to purchasers of certain cellphones. It's the first outgrowth of Nokia's Ovi brand, which the company announced earlier this year. It also seems to be the first implementation of Universal's Total Music plan, in which device makers bundle a music subscription on new devices and add the cost to the price of the device, rather than forcing consumers to pay the monthly fee.
(Credit:
Nokia)
As with all such services, the devil's in the details. According to Ars Technica, there's an awful lot of deviltry going on.
First, the good points: unlimited downloads, yours to keep and play forever, playable on both a computer and your cellphone.
However...the downloads are protected with DRM. (Ars Technica reports that it's Microsoft's PlaysForSure system, but this doesn't sound right to me: Microsoft has a phone-specific DRM system, PlayReady, and Nokia was the first customer for that system, so it would seem odd for Nokia to use a three-year-old DRM system designed for portable and in-home devices instead.) Regardless of which system it's based on, the DRM will reportedly not allow users to burn tracks to CD unless you buy the download again--this closes the analog hole by which users could download a million tracks, burn them, re-rip them to MP3, and post and share wildly. Also, any track protected with a Microsoft DRM system almost certainly won't be transferable to Apple's iPod, and might not be transferable to other types of MP3 players either.
But here's the oddest part: after your year's up, the subscription expires. You get to keep whatever music you've downloaded, but if you want to continue downloading new releases, you'll apparently have to buy a new phone. And Nokia's not yet saying how much extra these Comes With Music phones will cost.
As Saul Hansell points out in the New York Times, Comes With Music/Total Music is at least a good stab at an alternative business model. The current model's certainly not working for the industry. But these "free" tracks have to compete against millions of MP3 files that are already out there, and are actually free in every sense of the word--no cost (free like beer) and no usage restrictions (free like freedom).
Here's an alternate suggestion. Remove the DRM restrictions, but put a monthly limit on downloads so users can't download every song ever recorded then cancel their subscription and keep the music. Maybe 500 songs or 50 albums--that's a very generous amount for even the heaviest music fan. When a certain time period's up--say, a year--start charging for the subscription. A plan like this would still offer significant advantages over file-trading networks--over-the-air downloads, no legal risk, sound quality assurances, no false file names--while being "free" enough in both senses of the word to keep users around.
Yesterday, mobile phone giant Nokia announced it would license PlayReady, a new digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Microsoft. This is the first win for PlayReady, and represents a pretty major shift for Microsoft.
Until about two years ago, Microsoft's DRM strategy was tied up with the Windows Media platform. Microsoft invested considerable research and development into improving Windows Media DRM. For example, in 2004, Microsoft rolled out a new version of Windows Media DRM that made it viable for content owners to allow music from subscription-based services to be transferred to portable devices. With Windows Media DRM 10, if users stop paying their subscription, the content is disabled from playing on the portable device the next time users connect it to their PC. Prior to this DRM advance, content owners simply wouldn't allow subscription-based content onto portable services, rightly reasoning that users would download to their device's capacity, cancel their subscription, and end up with a huge library of very cheap music.
The point was: for content owners to take advantage of Microsoft's DRM technology, they had to offer content in the Windows Media file format. However, for the last couple of years, Microsoft's slowly been divorcing its DRM technology from the Windows Media platform. First, in Vista, Microsoft included video copy protection technology that had no requirement for nor dependency on any Windows Media technology. Now, it's created a DRM technology for mobile devices that, once again, has nothing to do with Windows Media. Rather, PlayReady lets mobile device manufacturers and carriers protect nearly any type of content--AAC audio, H.264 video, even games. Microsoft promises that it'll be forward-compatible with content that's already been protected using Windows Media 10 DRM, but other than that, there's no connection between the two technologies.
What does this all mean? It means that Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Media the de facto format for compressing and protecting digital media content have failed. Subtly, the company is acknowledging that Windows Media will coexist alongside other formats that, for whatever reason, are favored by end-users and content owners. (A lot of this has to do with Apple's runaway success with the iPod, which has popularized AAC audio.)
Leaving aside the format wars, can DRM succeed at all? Microsoft certainly continues to push ahead, but there are many in the technology community (including some Microsoft researchers) who argue that DRM is doomed--it's technically flawed from because the system eventually has to allow the "attacker" (the end-user) to access the protected content, and it's flawed from a business perspective because it asks consumers to bear the extra cost (in terms of processing requirements, hardware and software incompatibility, and higher prices for DRM-protected content) of something that does not benefit them. Those two problems lead to a large amount of readily available pirated content.
The Nokia deal's also interesting because Nokia's using PlayReady in a line of Symbian-based phones. Symbian is a mobile OS that competes directly against Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. This is typical Microsoft: the company often plays multiple sides of a market, occasionally even competing against itself, until a clear winner emerges.
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