Up until two days ago, I would have been exactly like the vocal
anti-PlaysForSure people in this discussion. DRM is super-irritating
and it means that you don't really own what you own, I'd've said.
Anyone who buys music from the iTunes store or whatever else is doing a
foolish thing by buying encumbered low-fi music, I'd've said.
And I'd still pretty much say that, but PlaysForSure now has a killer
app that makes sense in a lot of ways: The subscription services. The
way that these work (I've used the Yahoo one -- for $5 a month, why not?
-- but I'm sure that Napster and Rhapsody On The Go work the same way)
is that once you've paid the minimal entry fee (that $60 for a year of
Yahoo is about the same as four CDs) you can browse through a
reasonably large catalog of songs, and download whatever you like for
free, legally.
This wouldn't be especially interesting if you were limited to only
playing in one client, but you're not. The music you've downloaded is
standard WMA that will play on any PlaysForSure device. If you have a
new-ish MP3 player that's from one of the big non-Apple companies
(iRiver, Dell, Creative), you can put the tracks on there and listen to
them whenever you want. If you have a network media player that
supports PlaysForSure and WMC (Roku, D-Link, and others have these
available now), you can play the tracks on your main audio system just
like any of your other music. The Xbox 360 will let you listen to the
tracks, too, when it becomes available. So will Media Center
Extenders. And newer Windows Mobile cellphones.
In other words, PlaysForSure is a license-able standard that allows
protected content to be seamlessly played just about anywhere. And
while protected content is fundamentally uninteresting for purchases,
it's entirely understandable for subscription services. (Making a
subscription service without DRM is totally unworkable, as everyone
would subscribe for a month, download everything, and then quit.)
If a subscription service doesn't interest you, well, fine (though I'd
recommend trying it before coming to that conclusion), but railing
about how users of subscription services don't own the music is beside
the point -- I don't own the DVDs I get from Netflix, either, but it
doesn't bother me. If I want to buy a DVD or a CD (which I often do,
even with Netflix and Yahoo Unlimited), I know where Amazon is.
To bring this back on topic, where does this leave the Squeezebox?
Well, I've said before that there are three main media ecosystems out
there -- Apple, Microsoft, and other -- and that's becoming more and
more obviously true. The Squeezebox will never be a first-class member
of the Apple ecosystem, because only devices that have an Apple logo are
allowed to do that. The Squeezebox could become a first-class member of
the Microsoft ecosystem by supporting Windows Media Connect and
PlaysForSure (Roku was able to turn their Squeezebox-knockoff
SoundBridge into a real WMC/PlaysForSure device, so I'm sure Slim could
do the same), but that requires them to make a real commitment to those
Microsoft standards. If not, that'll leave Slim firmly in the other
category, where it really excels -- there's no other player whose
open-source, Unix-based capabilities are nearly as developed or
polished; from its Perl code base to native FLAC support, the
Squeezebox 2 is an ideal product for Linux users. But, boy, that's
really a small-ish niche...
--
mkozlows
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