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Graphic by Anand Parthasarathy.

Mobile music:(From left) Apple’s iPhone 3G; Sony Ericsson’s W88oi walkman phone and Nokia’s 5800 Xpress Music.

DRM is almost dead — Digital Rights Management, that is — the technology that the international music and movie publishing industry put in place some six years ago to restrict the way customers could play or transform digital music or multimedia content that they had legally bought. It was a panicky reaction to the freewheeling era of Napster and Gnutella — peer-to-peer music sharing sites that facilitated the exchange of music files across the Internet.

These P2P services were driven into extinction by lawsuits brought by bodies such as the Recording Industry Association of America — but that was not enough for the music publishers, including the Big Four: Warners, Universal, Sony BMG and EMI, all of whom had a thriving business in India.

BMG and Sony created software and hardware technologies that effectively removed from customers the ability to play music once bought legally on different platforms — like on a music system at home and on a laptop or portable player when on the move. Massive negative publicity did not deter the music labels and as recently as this year, American readers were enlivened by stories of music industry bodies taking housewives to court because a school going child had used the Internet connection to share a song he or she had bought with a few friends.

But DRM and its negative, customer-unfriendly connotations soon had the Big Four slowly abandon DRM on their CDs and DVDs: Sony BMG became the last to do so early in 2008. But in the world of direct music download it remains an irritant, albeit in small pockets.

When Apple launched its phenomenally successful iTunes service for its iPod and iPhone users, it charged a flat 99 cent fee for every track one bought. But when it created its own proprietary music format, rather than adapt the industry standard MP3, it locked its customers in, just as effectively as a DRM system.

It is essentially as a shot across the bows of Apple that the rush of announcements in recent weeks from a new niche in the music marketing business must be viewed. While MP3 players, Walkmans and iPods remain attractive vehicles to play music on the move, the mobile phone is slowly edging into this space, with one compelling selling point: If you already carry a phone, why carry a second device just to play music?

Mobile phones, particularly the models with a GPRS connection to the Internet, have the added advantage, unlike the unconnected music player, of being able to connect with Web-based music selling sites. The biggest of the Web players, such as Amazon, have encashed this advantage, by ditching DRM and offering thousands of paid and relatively unshackled music tracks. But this is an uneasy transition time between DRM and non-DRM downloads — and it can be traumatic for lay customers.

Walmart, which sells music using first Microsoft’s WMA format, and recently in MP3, announced in the US that starting October 9 it was giving up DRM. This was good news and bad news. The bad news was for its own customers who had downloaded hundreds of tracks in its earlier DRM-mode.

Suddenly they were left high and dry: Unless they spent time and money on transferring all their downloads to a CD and then copying them back to their players or PCs in a format like MP3, they risked all their files disappearing, once they needed to change its current storage medium. Here was a seller advising buyers to copy music to a new CD or risk losing it.

But did DRM not come in the first place to prevent such ‘outrageous’ deeds by customers? It was an irony that seemed to strike everyone — except the music industry.

How would it be if customers thought they were not paying for their downloads? Wouldn’t that woo them back in droves shouting: “All is forgiven. Gimme more”?

This is the new logic that seems to have driven at least two leading mobile handset makers, almost simultaneously.

In the kitschy, but historic interior of the Koko Club in London’s Camden Town, where Ellen Terry, the great actress and Bernard Shaw’s favourite, played a hundred years ago, and where Madonna sang to a packed house in this decade, the world’s biggest hand phone maker, launched a daring assault recently on the way the digital music business is funded and operates.

Nokia told buyers of its newest music phone, the 5800 XPressMusic as well as two other models, the 5310 music phone and the N95 smart phone: when you buy a new handset, you can download all the music you want from our Nokia music store, for free — for one year. After that you can keep the music, but if you want to download more, you have to pay — or buy another Nokia phone!

See the cunning logic! Nokia is banking on most buyers not downloading thousands of tracks but rather a hundred or so — and while ‘free’, each download brings money in connection charges to the service provider. Nokia sells a lot more numbers, of models it selects — and encourages buyers to throw them away and buy new models again and again. At the launch, Nokia announced that the new service, called ‘Nokia Comes with Music’, is partnered in the UK by all the Big Four music labels — and this is likely to be so in other geographies, including India, where the phone will be available after November.

Interestingly, Sony Ericsson, whose ownership of the Sony Walkman music player allowed it to create an entire line of Walkman — phones like the W 800 series — has also had the same brilliant thought. Starting with its native turf, the company has announced from its headquarters in Lund, Sweden, its own unlimited music service called PlayNow. And who are the music publisher partners? Why Sony-BMG, Warners, EMI and Universal!

Like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson has tied the offer to specific handsets — like the latest Walkman-phone the W902. Interestingly, it clings, albeit in a last ditch way, to DRM and says the digital rights hand cuffs will be removed at the end of what it calls unimaginatively the ‘contract period’.

But these are the death pangs of a technology that should never have been implemented — because it gave the customer less than meets the eye — and punished the honest buyer of legal music, in its broad swipe at ‘pirates’.

One might be tempted to ask, what in all this, has been the fate of the music creators, the song writers and the singers? So who is paying them, if end users get their work for free? The answer lies in the gamble that the Nokias and Sony Ericssons are playing: By adding a wee premium to the price of their handsets (say $25 or 30, in an asking price of around $300), they are able to pay the music publishers directly — and in wholesale rates — for the tracks that are placed on the free download sites.

‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’, goes the earthy American aphorism — and it remains true. You and I are still paying for the music we download ‘free’ — only in an indirect way. To tempt us, both Sony-Ericsson and Nokia used the phrase “all you can eat” to characterise the recent free download services, suggesting somehow, that we can gorge ourselves on free music till we fall down. That may be clever copy writing; but you can bet they are going to watch our download habits like hawks. The small print at Nokia speaks of unreasonable use and the company’s threat to cut off supply to musical gluttons hangs over us. But one thing is certain for the moderate among us, the days of paying directly, track by track for the music we love, might be gone with the wind that blew in the last ten days from London and Lund.

If you want to mint the musical millions, it helps if you have music somewhere in your corporate DNA. That is why Sony-Ericsson, was able to exploit the technology it already owned — Sony’s benchmark music player, the Walkman — to quickly morph music player into mobile phone and create the "W" series Walkman-phones. The W800 was the first in the series launched in August 2005. The W880i came to India early this year.

Apple had a similar edge when it launched the iPhone: it had its runaway success the iPod, ready and waiting — to be merged into the phone.

The new iPhone 3G launched few a weeks ago in India had almost all the functionality of the third generation iPod Nano that came last month

Nokia had no such musical heritage which is why its music phone happenings have been a case of what old-school naval captains called sailing with ‘all deliberate speed’ — swiftly — but not rushing to give the enemy the idea that you were panicking. Its Xpress Music phones — like the 5310, and last week’s new 5800 — share the quality acoustics that the company has strived to achieve.

The neighbourhood might not stand and cheer, but buyers of the 5800 are assured that their music-phone, with surround sound and base boost, has the loudest speakers ever put into a mobile phone. Did someone say, ‘let’s have a blast’?

More Stories on : Telecommunications | Music & Dance

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