My apartment building complex is wired like a university dorm; every single one of the 100 odd apartments is on a 10 Mbit LAN network, connected to a Bredbandsbolaget backboneThat’s 10Mb downloading and uploading. On this network, iTunes applications find each other effortlessly. I share my entire music library by default and have set the application to look for shared music, and I regularly have several other people’s music pop up in my application. Sometimes people use my music. With this kind of bandwidth, it’s a seamless background transactionBy “sharing” I really mean streaming music off somebody’s harddrive, without copying it..
For a few glorious weeks in May, a new version of iTunes allowed music sharing across the public internet, though doing so usually usurped the available bandwidth. Braying by music companies quickly put an end to that, though sharing is still allowed within the local network, the intention being that home computers can share music amongst themselves.
Intention or no, college dorm networks (and my apartment building) behave in exactly the same way, except that the sharing is done between people who likely have never met. All this is done legally. It’s why Stanford University students seem to be taking a shine to iTunes. Napster 2 can’t share. MusicMatch can’t either. And sharing benefits from the network effect, making iTunes a more and more compelling choice for each new user.
How does Apple get away with it? The iTunes music store’s digital rights management scheme allows those songs it sells to be used by up to three computers simultaneously, but these computers need to be authorized, a non-trivial process. Other music is sharable without restriction, however. This way Apple gets to protect its business, as well as that of the record companies.
Campus dorms and techsavvy Stockholmers are exactly the kind of trendsetters who will tip the balance in favor of iTunes.
The Swedes love iTunes
At least Stefan Geens does. He makes a great point about the file sharing abilities of the program – something that so many consumers want. I agree. These guys, however, don’t think it’s so great.
I am a personal fan of Rhapsody, a music subscription service which makes all others pale in comparison were it not for one seemingly unsurmountable (for some) problem: you don’t get to keep the songs. Rhapsody is a music subscription service from Listen.com which uses streaming technology instead of mp3 downloads, and for a $9,95 flat fee per month you get access to the largest music library of all the legal music subscription services. If you want to keep the songs and play them on other devices of course you could (illegally) capture the stream and convert it to mp3. But even though I intended to do this at first I find myself not even trying, preferring instead to log on whenever I please, from whichever computer I like (after installing the software of course, but basically we’re talking home and work) and having instant access to HiFi quality music with the ease of use of Amazon (recommendations, custom radio stations) and a back catalog that beats any of the other big ones (including ITunes). For the price of ten songs from Itunes a month I have access to hundreds of thousands of songs, and really I don’t find myself needing to download them. Sure it’s a subscription and I pay every month, but I found so much great new music I would never have come across otherwise, I have already saved myself hundreds in album sales. It’s a personal preference of course, but I know what I will stick to!
“Music isn’t porn, after all.”
It’s not often one gets quoted mentioning the word “porn” in Wired (or maybe it’s the start of a trend?), so I’d like to make the most of it by linking to “>Leander Kahney’s piece about the social ramifications of…
You just got linked to by WIRED… I found your site through a link from a story about iTunes Music sharing…
nice write. yea, good job on be’n linked by wired. i was just referred by them in one of their articles over the summer, when all the BuyMusic.com crap was goin on with http://www.boycottbuymusic.com that was of course, before an a-hole i know took over the site.
is anyone aware of a way to “upload” the music from other people’s itunes libraries when you are linked to a college system wired on the same network? in other words how can i obtain other people’s libraries and they mine? i know there’s a way. thanks yo, -shme