Brian's Brain

As regular Brian's Brain readers know, I'm a longstanding advocate of the subscription music concept. Somehow the idea of spending $10 or so per month for unlimited access to a million-plus tracks' worth of music content, accessible by PCs, portable devices and network-tethered playback devices alike, strikes me as preferable to dropping $15 on a lifetime license to a single CD's worth of material. To date, though, subscription music hasn't caught on to the degree that optimists forecasted upfront, a prediction undershoot that I find disappointing albeit not surprising.

Part of the issue involves DRM, a 'necessary evil' for subscription programs that defines ownership and access time limits, thereby ensuring the economic viability of digitally delivered rental content. The non-ubiquity of any particular DRM scheme precludes complete content portability and cultivates consumer discontent, as does DRM format (therefore DRM-inclusive content) obsolescence. And part of the issue, I suspect, is a mindset limitation. Unlike with video material, where a longstanding rental tradition exists, all but the youngest generations of music consumers have lengthy memories of going to brick-and-mortar stores and purchasing physical media. Buying digital bits is enough of a stretch for these folks; renting them is a seemingly too-extreme extension.

Last week, Microsoft built a bridge from the ownership past to the rental future, in an announcement that accompanied the unveiling of notable hardware price cuts. For $14.95 per month, you not only get unlimited access to the multi-million track Zune track library on a rental basis, you also get to keep up to 10 tracks per month even if you let your subscription lapse (or, pragmatically, if Microsoft ever shuts the Zune program down). Microsoft claims that roughly 90% of its available-for-purchase material is in DRM-free MP3 format; even if the tracks you want are laced with Zune DRM per music label request, you can still burn them to an audio CD and then re-rip the content in a DRM-circumventing manner.

As a thrifty (aka penny-pinching, aka tightwad) individual, my first thought was to focus this month's 10-track allocation on material that wasn't alternatively available on a rental basis. I'd seen the movie Man In The Sand (a documentary about a Woody Guthrie tribute project spearheaded by Billy Bragg, with Wilco and Natalie Merchant as notable additional participants) on Netflix Watch Instantly a few weeks earlier, so my initial attempt involved snagging a portion of the two-album Mermaid Avenue set, which I'd remembered from past perusal was only available for purchase from the Zune Marketplace. Alas, Mermaid Avenue I and II ended up being available for purchase in album-only form, not track-at-a-time, so they weren't candidates for Microsoft's 10-track subscription supplement.

Next, I recalled that Metallica insists on its content being purchase-only, and in fact the Zune Marketplace offered the band's material for sale on a track-by-track basis, but...nahhh. Turning my attention from heavy metal to electronic music, economic factors precluded me from pushing the 'purchase' button on the next acquisition candidate I considered, Armin van Buuren's excellent A State Of Trance 2007. Acquiring all 28 tracks would have taken me 3 months and the equivalent of $28, whereas the two-disc album only costs $14.99 on Amazon.com.

Eventually, since I kept running into dead ends every time I tried to find something I wanted to grab that wasn't also offered as a rental (a testimonial to the robustness of Microsoft's Zune subscription library), I switched gears and asked myself what bands' material I'd want to have a permanent copy of even if it was redundantly available in rental form. Taking my lead from Sound & Vision Magazine's recent Top 50 Albums of All Time stab, I decided to expand my scant Rolling Stones library with a few more albums' worth of the Glimmer Twins' material.

This month's 10-track download was Beggars Banquet (which leads off with what in my opinion is the Stones' finest tune); I plan to follow it with the nine-track Let It Bleed next month, and 10-track Sticky Fingers will start out the new year (in case you're wondering, I already own the outstanding Exile On Main St.). The Rolling Stones library isn't currently available in DRM-free form, but I had no trouble burning Beggars Banquet to a CD-R and then ripping it to in-the-clear WMA and AAC formats. Granted, in doing so I'm running the material through a second generation worth of lossy compression degradation, but given that the Zune library is in high-quality 192 kbps WMA form, I'm not terribly worried about discarded high frequencies and other artifacts.

The truly intriguing aspect of Microsoft's Zune program augmentation, to me, is the likely underlying record label motivation. Earlier, I mentioned the extremely high percentage of for-purchase Zune Marketplace content that's available in DRM-less form, from numerous record labels. Amazon's MP3 Marketplace is in a similarly advantageous state, as are several other online distribution sites. Who's not? Apple's iTunes Store.

Ironically, arguable, Apple led the charge into the no-DRM era with the early February 2007 publication of Steve Jobs' challenge to the music industry, followed by the early-April 2007 Apple agreement with EMI. But no other (notable, at least) label has followed EMI's DRM-discarding lead with iTunes Plus offerings, though they've freed up their content at plenty of other portals. Why? I 'spect that none of them are pleased with the degree of power that Apple currently wields in the digital distribution ecosystem, and they're hoping to use selective DRM dismissal as a means of rebalancing the playing field...in their favor.

Will they succeed? Not clear; I haven't yet seen obvious evidence that the bulk of iPod owners are chafing at the hinderances of Apple's hemogeny. But aside from DRM, the labels don't have many (if any) other arrows in their quivers. So they're relieving Amazon, Microsoft and others of their DRM burdens while insisting that Apple continues to shoulder it. And specifically, I suspect that they've financially incentivized Microsoft as partial-to-full compensation for the fiscal clobber that the company would otherwise endure as a result of last week's portable player price cuts and subscription-plus-purchase program expansion.

*See Let It Bleed track 9...;-)