“It’s over. Restrictions on copying digital music are going to be history — and all hell could break loose in the music retail business,” Kevin Kelleher reports for TheStreet.com.
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, what is this, February 6, 2007? Or it is April 2, 2007? Whichever it is, welcome to the party. Finally.
Kelleher continues, “Amazon.com’s move to sell more than 2 million songs free of digital rights management software, or DRM, could well be seen several years from now as the point of no return for this controversial technology.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it could be, Kevin, but only if you totally ignore February 6, 2007 and April 2, 2007.
Kelleher continues, “The days of music companies telling consumers when and how they can listen to their songs are numbered.”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin’s a newsman. It’s just old news that he prefers. Just how much of February 6, 2007 did you sleep through, all of it?
Kelleher continues, “Amazon’s move is — to lean on that useful but overused buzz phrase — a tipping point. DRM is a well-intentioned idea that served to drive many music consumers away.”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, the tipping point occurred on April 2, 2007 as precipitated by the event that happened on February 6, 2007. Yes, we know. You slept in.
Kelleher continues, “One of the biggest beneficiaries of DRM has been Apple. As Daniel Del’Re pointed out in his coverage of the Amazon announcement, when people buy songs on iTunes, ‘the only portable music device on which users can play back songs is the iPod.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, which part of the following did you not understand exactly?
…Abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat… Convincing [the music labels] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs on, you guessed it, February 6, 2007
Furthermore, have Mac and PC notebooks with iTunes been reclassified as “non-portable” devices, Kevin? If not, then iPods have never been the only portable music devices on which users can play back music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Store. It certainly felt portable enough listening to iTunes Store music on a MacBook Pro while cruising at 30,000 feet on our last plane trip, Kevin. Of course, simply burning a CD from iTunes (iTunes is a software application, Kevin, it differs from the iTunes Store which is actually an online service accessed via the iTunes application) and either playing that CD on a portable CD player (is that a “portable” enough music device, Kevin?) or reimporting it into other also-ran MP3 players also proves the utter fallacy of your and Daniel Del’Re’s statement.
Kelleher continues, “In that way, DRM has served as a retaining wall for Apple, keeping the owners of 100 million iPods sold to date within the iTunes corral when they buy music. (Well, most of them. Our house is home to three iPods, and we have yet to buy a single song through iTunes for this very reason.)”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, our not-too-bright friend, if you have 3 iPods and you’ve never bought a single song from the iTunes Store, then — unless you’ve never listened to music on any of your iPods — then you’ve just conclusively proven that iPod owners are in no way “corralled” into buying music from the iTunes Store. Logic is your friend, Kevin. So is chronological order. Try them both someday.
Of course, if you hadn’t missed February 6, 2007, you would have read Steve Jobs’ letter which explained quite clearly, “Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold. Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store… It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.”
Kelleher continues ignorantly congratulating Amazon and misunderstanding what’s really happening in his full piece, Think Before You Click™, here.
Hi, kids! My name’s Kevin Kelleher and I’m either an ignorant douchebag or a pathetic spinmeister!!
Can you guess which one I am? Can ya, kids?
Can ya, huh???
Kevin’s not dumb. He’s on the take. It’s obvious he was paid to write a promo piece for Amazon. Even the simplest research of DRM, it’s use, and it’s demise would have made Kevin aware that Amazon is not the originator or consumer saviour as he is portraying them. In fact, it could be argued that Amazon is simply a tool being used by the major entertainment conglomerates to dismantle iTunes.
< Arrogant French tone > Idiot! < / Arrogant French tone >
“Man, I can’t believe I actually get paid for this job.
It’s a good day to be Kevin Kelleher.”
” DRM is a well-intentioned idea that served to drive many music consumers away.”
Bullcrap!. Overpriced CD’s full of one or two good songs has done more to drive away consumers than any DRM ever has. Besides I don’t even think most people know what DRM is and how it works.
And how many of those songs are digitally watermarked…. better be careful Kevin or you might end up being sued when your copy of a Michael Bolton album ends up in the public domain.
MacDailyNews: “Kevin, meet your newly ripped asshole. Newly ripped asshole, Kevin.”
he he he, this guy just wake up from a coma…
“Just how much of February 6, 2007 did you sleep through, all of it?”
“you’ve just conclusively proven that iPod owners are in no way “corralled” into buying music from the iTunes Store. Logic is your friend, Kevin.”
Good ones MDN
Hey, they don’t allow user comments.
They think that they invented the concept of buy low, sell high. OMG.
They have nothing useful between the ears.
Welcome to The Street.
To MDN, “Think before you click”. Thank you. You are so right. You saved my time and frustration.
Later,
en
WTF??
That guy should be fired!
$%&”##”!
“Logic is your friend, Kevin. So is chronological order. Try them both someday.”
ROTFLMFAO!
Where can we send the FeedBack?
Feedback link to Kevin Kelleher and TheStreet.com regarding this story:
link
Logic is your friend, Kevin. So is a full set of chromosomes.
Yes – Amazon support from the music industry is strictly to break the stranglehold that iTunes currently has.
Idiot – THE MUSIC STORE DOES NOT MATTER!! What matters is the ease in which the iTunes Application and the iPod interact. Whether one buys digital music from Amazon or CDs from Best Buy won’t matter to iPod sales; which is where the real money is made.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
This guy must have been living in a cave for the last 2 years.
Seriously man, look on the internet and do some fscking research!
Your ignorance is laughable and insulting.
Kevin is even more of a moron than their last shill Troy Wolverton! Wolverton at least got canned and ended up at the San Jose Mercury News.
Is TheStreet.com popular? Are its usual readers as stupid as the people that write for it? I won’t call the writers “journalists” or “analysts,” since it is apparent they are too stupid to be either.
Someone once said to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but I’m beginning to wonder if the whole gang at TheStreet pimp themselves out to the highest bidder. Their stupidity seems far too consistent to me.
MW: red, the color of the MDN Take.
What, I say what the h*ll is going on today?!
All these misinformed articles on Apple all at once, with supposed tech writers who clearly don’t have a clue what’s going on in technology, nor do they seem to know what has gone on in the technology world in the past 8 months.
Who would want these kinds of morons working for you? Not me. And research? Not them.
Great takes MDN. I hope you sent this guy and the US News guys copies of what you wrote.
Bastards…
Steve Talked, Amazon Did.
Amazon is already a far bigger player in music sales than Apple will ever be. That is what gives them the leverage to do this right.
Add to that, record companies now hate Steve and Apple and are looking for any way to cut Apple out of the loop while still selling to iPod owners.
I just sent Kevin an email…told him to come to this thread and get “educated” (and hopefully shamed).
TheStreet.com never fails to ammuse.
I’m gonna be a tech writer when I grow up….a fsckin chimpanzee could do it. First Dvorak and Elderly(or however you spell it), now this guy? What a noob!!
@byeTunes
Actually iTunes is the #3 distributer of music in the US behind Best Buy and Walmart and well ahead of Amazon:
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/14003/