Viral DRM, small bands, and album colatteral

I’m using iTunes music store more and more, and I like the Apple DRM – it’s certainly workable and the quality of service from them is pretty good – you get downloads in minutes. The tracks are currently only 128kbps sample rate which is a shame, but I’m sure it will improve over time. The only time the DRM is a pain is when I want to give some tracks to a friend to listen to – I have to burn to a CD, rip them, and then send them.

Of course this is supposedly what DRM is meant to prevent, but while you can only hear 30s clips of tracks on iTunes Music Store (for example) you can’t use this to “sell” new music to your friends in the sense of getting them into the tracks so they might later purchase. Fans are the best salesmen for music, not record stores or radio.

What DRM needs is “viral” capabilities. If every iTunes purchased track allowed you to send it, complete with DRM, to anybody you like but they can only play it 3 times, then we have something much more powerful – especially if those people can also send it on to others with limited plays. Tricky to implement, that is true – I suppose the only way to achieve this is with some small communication with the server whenever it is played, so it can only be decrypted on demand, a certain number of times – and this might preclude copying such tracks to an iPod or similar device (until they too are connected to the internet).

Even though I think Apple’s DRM is pretty good and iTunes Music Store works well, as somebody who works closely with an established artist CARDIACS, it is painfully obvious to me that there is a long way to go before CDs are replaced with purely digital downloads in a way that is satisfactory to the artists and consumers. No matter that CD Jewel cases are perhaps the single worst invention hewn from plastic in the last 20 years.

Many people have covered this already, but the primary disappointment with iTunes Music Store so far is the lack of additional material that brings you closer to the artist:

• Extra art work (CD inner pages) and “liner notes”
• Lyrics
• Writing credits etc per song
• Band thank-yous

The silly thing is that this won’t be difficult to add to existing MP3 tagging mechanism. iTunes can even let you enter this data for your own tracks.

Having said this, adding such metadata in this form will not, I believe, be the right solution for the future. It relies too much on conventional CDs.

Why not just set a form factor (i.e. square) or slightly worse some standard dimensions (600×600 pixels) and have embedded browser in iTunes and similar players that refers to a URL associated with the track, and also a separate URL for the album itself.

This way artists can produce any web-based content any way they like (make it XHTML of course) to accompany their albums and tracks, and when playing a track you can browse a “page” specific to that track (which could be a whole micro site in itself) or browse to the album’s “cover” URL. What happens beyond there is up to the artist. This gives great flexibility in that for artists who want to break free of the album format and work on a basis of individual tracks or small collections of them, they can provide as much or as little content as they like, but can still have the option of linking them to a parent collection.

Linking from tracks to albums they are from is what is completely missing now – there is no data associated with an album apart from the album title. Embedding a URL to the album (rather than track) collateral in every track will solve this.

Albums won’t go away – artists like to produce works that sit alongside each other, and in a specific order. I think it very unlikely that all artists will be reduced to just trying to write “singles” in the future.

This kind of approach – especially if you just go for locking down the aspect ratio – means that applications can do nice and interesting things with the “artwork” and it leverages existing technologies, and only needs a couple of URLs in the metadata tags of files.

This approach can be implemented easily without changes to the existing MP3 tagging mechanisms. If the URL field is used to point to a snippet of XML that describes the collection of tracks, you can then include a bookmark reference into the URL that includes the track number/title/id… and the XML would then point the browser at the correct content to display for that individual (now playing) track.