Would You Like Fries With That Download?
from the no-surprise-there dept
It's getting to be a bit silly, at this point, but it appears that every major consumer brand feels the need to have some sort of pointless music download store strategy. The latest to enter the fray is McDonald's, who is hashing out the details of a deal with Sony, to put its name on their music store, and promote the music store within its restaurants. They'll also have some Pepsi/iTunes like deal to offer customers free tunes. In other words, this will be yet another different music download setup, which will probably have more restrictions and won't work with any other music download store. Want to listen to your McDonald's awarded free tunes? Well, you'll have to play those separately from the free tunes you downloaded from Pepsi. When will the madness stop?
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Re: No Subject Given
Sam, you misread Mike's bias (which he hasn't changed at all, even here.) What Mike wants (as I understand it,) and what most music industry customers want (again, as I understand it,) is a single music download service which offers the entire collection of every music label, in a DRM-free format (so that we can put it on a jukebox or burn it to disk, or put it in our personal or car MP3 players,) which offers songs we want at a reasonable price, and which rewards the musician for their work, not corporate stocks or middleman profit margins. Adding another, DRM-laden walled garden to the mix of the many download services with their own extremely limited selection, DRM-ridden, and over-priced music is not what the consumer wants, and sooner or later these services are all going to fail, and when they do, we'll be right back where we started, though the RIAA will have more amunition as to why we are all evil and should be sued in order to increase the size of their wallets because we don't have any interest in buying their product and want one that is more geared towards what the consumer (the person with the money and power) wants instead of what the RIAA wants.
When will the madness stop?
Mike, madness such as this is inherent in our species, and will always exist (at least until we nuke ourselves off the planet or an asteroid kills us all off.) Hopefully cooler, more intelligent heads will take over by driving the mad ones out of business, but I suspect that will be extremely difficult as the mad ones push for more and more laws to keep the cooler heads from putting them out of business. But sooner or later, just like Microsoft's ultimate fall from power, cooler heads will prevail (hopefully before such nuclear or asteroid-caused annihilation.)
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Re: No Subject Given
No change. While I did use such corporate sponsorship as an example of the idea that music was becoming a commodity that would be used to help advertise other products, I have never been for the idea of a music download store - which has all of the bad, and none of the good of a true peer-to-peer distribution system.
It gets increasingly worse when each company is using their own store and their own format making life much worse for the consumer.
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typo
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Sony woes
What's the URL for iTunes?
John.
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