Seattlest Roundtable: Do We Care If Copy Protection for Downloaded Songs is Lifted?

James: I buy CDs and sometimes download. My brother downloads exclusively. From what I can tell, somewhere between 1970 and 1974, generations shifted.

Kim: Yeah but I was born in 77 and I love cds. The only reason I bought an ipod was because it would make reviewing cds easier if I could load them all into there and walk around listening to them for a week or two, rather than having to make a point of sitting in my house with a CD on the stereo and have to stop everything Im doing to listen to it over and over.

I like the idea of downloadable tracks, being able to buy only one song from a cd if that's all you want, etc., but I don't do it. I'm gonna add my snore to the snore pile on this one.

Jeremy: I download almost exclusively except for albums not available on legal download sites. I tried downloading from peer to peer networks, but the software pissed me off and the quality usually wasn't there, so all I ever got was rarities and b-sides. I stopped using iTunes, though, because of the drm and use emusic, which is great. It's a subscription site with a base of like 40 songs a month, no drm, and once you've downloaded a song, you can download as many times as you want without using up anymore unique download credits. Which means everything I've bought from emusic is effectively backed up on emusic so long as I maintain a subscription. And while it doesn't have the big four record companies, I don't even really listen to that crap anymore. THe only two albums last year I wanted to get but weren't on emusic were Tool and Gnarls Barkley, the latter probably just because it had so much buzz, since its lable otherwise sells through emusic.

Seth: Huh...wonder if there's a music geek/normal person divergence on this...I buy music online all the time--usually just a song I heard on the radio that I like.

Michael: I made the move to subscription-only a while ago, and only buy stuff that's not in the catalog. I started with Rhapsody and then switched to Yahoo! Music because it was so frickin' cheap. Like $5/mo. I find I listen to a wider variety of music on the subscription basis. It's true that if I lose power/internet I'll be without a lot of music. However, I'll always have the voices in my head.

Clint: Ditto. I've got an ipod and love itunes for listening (though not so much
since ourtunes was killed). But I've still got a huge cd collection and will keep hitting up Easy Street for more. I've never purchased a song online, and doubt I will until cds go away and we're forced to. Or until Pearl Jam goes completely digital.

Jeremy: It may seriously be a normie vs. geek thing. It can definitely go both ways--I've met plenty of rock snots who think mp3s are the worst thing to happen to music since CDs, and plenty of computer geeks who gleefully refuse to buy from ITunes unless there's a way to crack the drm. Back in college, I used Napster and then Xangaa all the time; I only switched when I moved to Seattle and we had Internet through the UW--my girlfriend was a TA, and she could be fired for using file sharing networks. We didn't have cash for better service, and that sort of corresponded to not having cash for CDs. So I started doing one off songs on ITunes, then the albums for $9.99 seemed like a good deal, so I started those. Then I get hooked and switched to Emusic.

Editor Dan: I want to get in on this, but now it's going to seem like I'm grandstanding for a panel. [Ed: Yep.] Fuck it. I think both Apple and Microsoft realize that DRM isn't tenable and that the future of music distribution is by subscription. Once you can buy a device that has little to no local storage but is in constant contact via wifi with a celestial jukebox owned by MS or Apple or whoever that contains every song ever they're free to charge you $5 or $10 a month for access to it and DRM becomes moot. Not only will your ipod play music this way, but also your stereo, your car, etc. Last.fm will become incredibly wealthy.

Deciding how that pie gets sliced up should take the better part of the next ten years, though. In the meantime I'll continue buying CDs which I'll touch exactly once to rip to mp3 before I put it into iTunes. Seems stupid to have two versions of the same file sitting around, but I refuse to get trapped in an application.