iPod Users Buy CDs, Shun iTunes

twitter writes, "The BBC's summarizes a Jupiter Research study, 'iPod fans shunning iTunes store.' From the article: '83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly... only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites... [T]he only salient characteristic shared by all owners of portable music players was that they were more likely to buy more music — especially CDs.' This is despite years of iTunes promotion and apparent success. Given the outright failure of other music services, it is clear that users prefer DRM-free music, and are willing to pay for it and take the trouble to rip it."

DRM is a hassle

This is exactly what I have been doing since the beginning of iTunes. DRM on my music simply does not satisfy for a number of reasons including 1) quality (I can tell the difference). 2) It's a hassle to have to deal with the inability of others on my subnet to not be able to listen to (share) the DRM encoded songs. 3) I already had a huge amount of music on CD and have relied on ripping to iTunes as a back up means.

Interestingly, iTunes has increased my music purchases significantly, though on CD,

Re:DRM is a hassle

Yeah, I've bought more CD's now than before not because of iTunes, but because of Pandora.com. Points 1, 2, and 3 are very valid. Also, you're unable to resell your iTunes music collection if you wish.

I find it odd how I'm so anti-iTunes due to the stated reasons, but I'm more than willing to buy games on Xbox Live Arcade, seeing as they fit within similar restrictions. Well, only if they're original and not repackaged retro-games I've played to death.

It probably has to do with the fact that Xbox Live Arcade games are only available through a restricted medium, where I can bypass iTunes and buy a non-DRMed CD and Vorbis it.

Re:DRM is a hassle

Perhaps the reason youre more willing to suffer the same problem with Xbox Live Arcade is because its a different application, a different type of entertainment.

Music and games are entertainment, but they fill different facets of the entertainment genre.

Also, a video game seems "worth" more to the average person - you can get more out of it. A song is entertaining for the 3 minutes its playing.

-Red

Re:DRM is a hassle

Music makes memories. Hardly when I am playing an old game do I remember the old times with it. So there is no urge to play old games as their is to listen to old music on occasion.

Re:DRM is a hassle

DRM on my music simply does not satisfy for a number of reasons including 1) quality (I can tell the difference).

When is this faux-audiophile bullshit going to end. DRM does not change the sound of music. It does not sound any different.

A DRMd 128kbps AAC file decrypts and uncompresses to the exact same waveform as a non-DRMd 128kbps AAC file. It sounds just as bad.

A DRMd lossless format decrypts and uncompresses to the exact same waveform as a non-DRMd lossless file. It sounds just as good.

You cannot tell the difference between a DRMd file and a non DRMd file all else being equal. End of story, no argument, thank you take the next gate out of here.

Re:DRM is a hassle

lol. If you had ears worth a damn you would know that encryption of any kind irreversibly changes the data being streamed through it, and thus causes a definite change in the sound. I don't know the exact reasons for it, but you cannot deny that the data is being changed. According to Quantum theory anyway, you cannot help but change something like the resulting wave form simply by observing it, and you NEED to observe it in order to change it into an encrypted form, and then again in order to apply the unencryption key.

In my experience it changes the music in odd ways different to the changes that compression cause. It gives a bass that's more harsh, and increases the midrange while levelling out in the high end. That's an issue totally separate to what happens when you compress with AAC or MP3 or whatever. If you want to test, make an mp3 and then make two identical copies of the file. Run one of the resulting compressed files through an encryption utility (it doesn't have to be Apple's fairplay, even sending it via PGP email will do) and then decrypt it. Play the never-encrypted file and play the encrypted then decrypted file one after another, you'll easily tell the difference.

Re:It's "let's pretend to be a programmer day"

You're the kind of guy that the audiophile crystal audio clarifier salesman loves to see walking in the door.

Re:It's "let's pretend to be a programmer day"

Dude the ears of old audio nuts claim that DIGITAL data sounds different when sent through fiber optic digital links rather than other digital links. It is a figment of their imagination. It is not like one has to guess. You do a checksum of the file before encryption, and you do a checksum after encryption, either the number has changed or not. Most encryptions are fully reversable.

Re:DRM is a hassle

ol. If you had ears worth a damn you would know that encryption of any kind irreversibly changes the data being streamed through it, and thus causes a definite change in the sound.

This is the biggest load of crap I've read on /. in a long time. Congratulations!

Encryption makes the data appear pseudo-random, however the decryption will return the bits, before they are inserted into the audio buffer, to the exact same state they were in prior to encryption.

Your own test bears this out -- just do a comparison of the resulting files. The computer has no way of knowing that the "encrypted" file was ever even encrypted (as you aren't replacing the bits -- you're duplicating them). If you can hear a difference, it's only because the voices in your head are getting louder. Or maybe your tinfoil hat is askew.

Yaz.

Re:DRM is a hassle

Of course the computer will identify them as being the same, its job is to work with discrete components in the form of bits, where the human ear can hear on a lower level than that. I'm no digital maven, so I can't say the EXACT reason why, but I've been selling, repairing and setting up high end audio systems for 17 years. It's my job to know what sounds the same and what sounds different. Perhaps the bits themselves are longer or shorter than before encryption, or perhaps they're a bit (pun intended) higher voltage where a computer will still read it as a "1" when it's in a bass waveform, therefore things like md5sum will claim it's the same file, but if you knew anything about signals over a wire you'd know things like a waveform that can be represented digitally can look (and sound) very different depending on the size of the peaks and troughs.

As it happens, I know quite a bit about digital signaling. I also know that that "bit" you're reading is going to be converted several times from when you read it fro the hard disk, by a variety of independent subsystems which set their own bit levels as high or low, based on their own signaling specifications.

You read some bits off your hard drive. The bits sitting on your drive have no voltage -- they're simply a magnetic field. This field get translated into either a 1 or a 0 bit. The drive controller copies this into a voltage that it then transmits across the drive bus to a bus controller. This bus controller then copies the bit to the system bus. The system bus copies it to the CPU, which copies it to RAM, which is then refreshed thousands of times per second. This is then copied back onto the system bus, and send to your audio hardware, which feeds it through a DAC.

Each of these transmissions is a copy operation on the bit -- not on the strength of the magnetic field, or whatever voltage was being applied to the transmitting component. So signaling in this case makes no difference -- so long as each field or voltage fits within the proper tolerances, it will be treated as a 1 or a 0, and will be raised high or low at the new voltage level as a completely new signal during each conversion. As such, it isn't the case that if the bit is magnetically weak on your hard drive that it will have a lower-than-normal voltage once it finally gets into RAM.

Thinking of it another way, it isn't like using a tin-can-and-string telephone to transmit data. It's more like the telephone game, where someone says something to someone, who then tells the message to the next person, and so on until the recipient receives the message. It doesn't matter if the first speaker is male or female -- the last person to pass on the message is going to state the same message regardless, in their own voice. The only difference in the case of a computer is that most stages have integrity checking to verify that the message is received properly, and in some cases can either request a retransmission if the integrity checking fails, or can receive the data in a manner that it can be reconstructed with mathematical certainty by using appropriate data encodings.

Encryption makes no difference. The system is not analogue -- it is digital. And the system only knows two digits. Each individual subsystem has completely different mechanisms for representing those bits, and that representation is completely independent of other subsystems. Reading an encrypted block from your hard drive causes the encrypted data to be copied into RAM, from which a decrypted copy is placed into RAM. This copy is generated electrically in exactly the same fashion if it had been read unencrypted from the hard drive. By the time it gets to the audio DAC, the data is identical from both a data and a signaling standpoint.

I'm sure you can handily replace the needle on a record player arm, but you know absolutely squat about digital signaling.

Yaz.

Playing devil's advocate...

I agree that DRM'ed music should sound no different, but let me play devil's advocate for a minute.

It might be possible that the decryption algorithm introduces some jitter by taking a varying amount of time to decrypt a chunk of data [cryptography.com]. A poorly-engineered system might pass this jitter through to the DAC, resulting in degraded audio quality. It might also be possible that the decryption operations cause the CPU to introduce additional noise on the power rails, which might also impact audio quality in a poorly-engineered system.

So, I don't think it's impossible that DRM affects sound quality. I'm just not convinced that it actually does.

Re:You fed the troll. Good job.

Congratulations to all who bit at this troll, and took it hook, line, and sinker.

Let's ignore your assumption that this person is a troll for a second (something which I do not necessarily believe, although I also can't discount it as a possibility). When a technical falsehood like this goes unchallenged, those who are less technically inclined are likely to believe it, and pass it on as truth.

Slashdot is known as a technical site. If such claims do not go unchallenged, there is a very good chance that someone out there is going to read this, and relay it to their non-technical friends and family as the truth, because they read it on Slashdot.

I routinely have to explain reality to far too many people around me because they read something that is physically impossible on the web, and then believe it (and pass it on). Certain family members in particular are highly susceptible to such claims. They wouldn't be able to spot it as a troll, however dozens of posts from respectable, knowledgeable people pointing out the falsehoods may cause them to question the veracity of the trolls claims.

Troll or not, falsehoods need to be challenged, especially in the technical realm, which is really just "magic" to the layman in the first place.

Yaz.

Re:DRM is a hassle

It's homeopathy! The bits remember being encrypted!

Re:DRM is a hassle

Actually, it's worse than that. Encryption and decryption tends to stress the bits, so that rather than representing 0's and 1's, the bits can be off by up to 0.01, leading to degradation of the sound quality of the resulting audio data.

Sony has patented a superior bit, which should be hitting the market in late 2007, but in typical Sony style, these new bits, which represent 2 or 3, instead of 0 or 1, will not be compatible with existing bits. So while audio files that utilize the new Sony bits will lose far less fidelity per bit from being encrypted and unencrypted (less than 0.001% according to laboratory testing), they will not be compatible with the iPod without an expensive bit adapter.

Re:DRM is a hassle

PGP is a lossless encryption whereas fairplay uses a watermark technique. Big difference in algorithms and quantum theory has nothing to do with it.

The difference between a DRM'd song and one that you rip yourself is an issue of control. With iTunes you are stuck with 128kbps AAC encoded by their in house encoding/DRM software. When you rip a song yourself you have the option of using any one of myriad different encoders, algorithms, bitrates, configurations, and etc. I usually use 240-355 VBR WMA encoding for personal use.

Personally I've only purchased one album from iTunes (unfortunatly I can no longer play it because I've changed computers too many times) and while their encoding method is fine for listening through earbuds, it shows noticable degredation vs. PCM on my 7.1 home theater setup. But it has nothing to do with watermarking DRM and it definately has nothing to do with quantum theory and schrodinger's cat, it is all about the bitrate and the encoding software. And Apple uses a substandard encoder set to a bitrate that is almost pallatable to AOL dial-up customers.

Re:DRM is a hassle

Personally I've only purchased one album from iTunes (unfortunatly I can no longer play it because I've changed computers too many times)

Just so you know, there is a button in the iTunes Music Store account information page that lets you deauthorize all the computers that you've previously authorized to play your music. It only lets you do this once a year IIRC, but it's useful if you've reached your limit of 5 computers and can't get to an authorized computer to deauthorize it.

Re:DRM is a hassle

[...] I usually use 240-355 VBR WMA encoding for personal use.

Personally I've only purchased one album from iTunes (unfortunatly I can no longer play it because I've changed computers too many times) and while their encoding method is fine for listening through earbuds, it shows noticable degredation vs. PCM on my 7.1 home theater setup. But it has nothing to do with watermarking DRM and it definately has nothing to do with quantum theory and schrodinger's cat, it is all about the bitrate and the encoding software. And Apple uses a substandard encoder set to a bitrate that is almost pallatable to AOL dial-up customers.

Oh great, another Microsoft fan spreading FUD about Apple.

First of all, WMA has been shown to be the worst (or second worst) CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done.

Second, you can reset the list of computers that are allowed to play your purchased songs. In iTunes, go to the music store and click on your account button. If you have 5 authorized computers in your list, you should have a button next to "computer authorizations" which you can use to reset the list. You can use that feature once or twice a year AFAIK. You then simply re-authorize the current computers that you want to use. You don't need the old computers to de-authorize them.

Third, AAC was developped by Dolby and was shown to be the best or second best CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done. As for the bitrate, AAC is more efficient with 128kbps than MP3 or WMA.

Re:DRM is a hassle

DRM does not change the sound of music. It does not sound any different.

No, but I cannot purchase from the iTMS songs that are encoded at higher rates. That was my point.

Re:DRM is a hassle

Ssh.

It may not be rational, but if it gets the plebes to opose DRM, it's good for everyone in the long run.

but I already have a TON of CD's

Why do I need to buy all those again, if I buy, I'll probably buy via iTunes, but I've got a large catalog already purchased. This isn't shunning.

Re:but I already have a TON of CD's

If iTunes would take the time to notice that previous authorizations are never heard from again after I authorize a new install, it should just allow me to go along my merry, non-infringing way and let me listen to the music that I paid for.

Apple is more than happy to do this. You can go into your account settings in iTunes, and tell it to deauthorize ALL of your prior computers. You then can authorize your current system and listen to all those songs again.

As for old systems, maybe you should consider deauthorizing them before you get rid of them or overwrite the OS. Then this wouldn't be an issue at all.

Who would've thought?

So appearantly the majority prefers freedom over convenience? Well, at least it keeps my hopes up for humanity.

Re:Who would've thought?

I expect that the reality is that people prefer buying physical things to buying something as ethereal as a downloaded file.

Blizzard makes over $100 million a month selling a chance to get a purple sword.

Let's be honest here

The majority of music bought by owners of iPods may come from CDs but the majority of iTunes music stored on the device probably wasn't bought.

Re:Let's be honest here

Who cares? The article also says that ipod owners were shown to be more likely to buy music in general. That means that regardless of how much of their music collections is pirated the music industry is alienating their best customers with DRM.

I've never purchased from iTunes.

Never... and I don't really plan on doing so. I just like having a CD of my music, produced professionally, etc. Perhaps I'm behind the times, but the only stuff I get from iTunes is my podcasts.

If iTunes remembered online that I owned the rights toa piece of software and could download it again at a later time perhaps I would use it (thats me speaking blindly, I haven't even looked into it that much). My wife has downloaded a few songs from iTunes if I recall, but we both have a decent CD collection and tend to support the artists that we like by getting their whole CD.

Is it just me, or was the new iTunes release a step down from the last one? I just don't like the interface as much.

Justin
http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Re:most of us have a cd collection.

(drat - hit submit rather then preview - wish there was an edit)

For those looking to rip CD's, but not learn how the command line LAME encoder works, check out audiograbber [com-us.net]. Makes quick work of turning a collection into MP3 format.

What a bad statistic

A lot of iTunes users had large CD collections before iTunes. So saying that most of their music is on CD is a pretty misleading statistic. Better is to look at music bought in the last n weeks.

No, no, no

"it is clear that users prefer DRM-free music, and are willing to pay for it and take the trouble to rip it."

I have an iPod, I rarely buy anything from the iTunes Music Store, and it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with DRM. The albums I want to buy are quite often in the $12-$13 range on iTunes, and I can get them in CD form at the same price or even cheaper. When I buy the CD I get a) higher quality, and b) a permanent backup I can store in a closet or cupboard.

I think what's really going on is that people can see the obvious: the price structure (digital vs. physical medium) is currently way out of whack. You don't save anything by buying the digital version! Why would you do it? It's not like I ever find myself saying "I just HAVE to own the new Audioslave, and I can't BEAR to wait 3 or 4 days for it!"