Microsoft is innovating with the Zune player, most notably by bringing to the market the first mp3 player allowing wireless exchange of musical files. It sounds like a nice idea but there is a catch: every song you will receive from other players can be played three times before they get automatically deleted.

Problem is, this protection against the evil consumer is violating many licenses, most notably the creative commons ones. 99% of musicians, the ones who like me are stupid enough to make music for fun, have only one incentive: getting their friends to listen to their music and share it. With Zune we will lose that right because Microsoft has “no way to sniff out what you are sending” so they “wrap it all up in DRM”.

It is again a case of the worst-case scenario becoming the norm to protect the interests of a minority. The musical market is increasingly made of independent artists and new and innovative labels. The market share of the big music companies has dramatically decreased^*, probably as much as what TV is experiencing because of youtube. Yet these guys still have their entries into the high spheres of the economic world, getting their voice heard as if they represented the whole market. An increasingly disturbing aberration.

Zune reminds me of airport security, treating everybody as terrorists – lowering the global quality of life in the process – while missing 60% of all bombs, i.e. being dissuasive at best, useless at worst.

More info on medialoper.com

^* I am not speaking in monetary terms here, but in listening time. If you have seen some numbers on this I would be happy to have a look, my email is on the right side of this site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 9:16 pm and is filed under music, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.