In the digital world, you can make anything anywhere and anyone can have copies without you losing yours. I would so download a car, and so would anyone. But traditional business models rely on scarcity.

The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.

As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”

iTunes beat into people’s heads that they could buy a single song instead of a CD of two good songs and lots of crappy filler. Song Parts gets down to the little bit of the song that’s actually the cool bit, and offers it to you for a few cents. (Not really.) WFMU gives it about a week to live.

Eric Harvey at Pitchfork posts a social history of the MP3. “It’s possible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.” And I remember the early ’80s, when the cassette was going to change everything …

Google now gives away legal downloads in China. And thus the official market catches up with the kids with 500GB USB drive parties.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s only-a-wafer-thin-slice-of-DRM Comes With Music service is all but dead, with 23,000 users total in the UK. Gosh, etc.

It’s not just Microsoft’s DRMed music at twice the price, which will be as popular as a Zune running Vista. It’s the PR guy’s answers. Let me translate for you:

“Oh dear God, kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé’s a car crash, I wish I could be laid off, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

Customers loathe and despise DRM. What’s a marketer to do? Advertise products as “DRM-free” when they’re nothing of the sort! After Sony and Nokia comes MySpace. Their “DRM-free” service involves music that can only be played over the Internet while you’re sitting at the computer on their web page having your eyes gouged out by the tasteful graphic design they’re famous for. I look forward to their explanations to Trading Standards if they try selling this one in the UK. I also look forward to the MySpace equivalent of these.

DAS BUNKER, British Phonographic Industry, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Sony-Ericsson has announced PlayNow Plus, a new plan for unlimited “DRM-free” music downloads on phones.

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

“That’s how things are done these days,” says drummer Lars Ulrich. “Also, there’s the novelty of anyone wanting to listen to a Metallica album.”

Of course, the real alternative to the iPod is a cheap Chinese MP3 player labeled “MP4″ (a blatant lie you wish the MPEG LA would bother wielding their considerable trademark dicks concerning). They’re cheap, they play music, they’re cheap and they’re cheap. Dreadful interface firmware — I got mine free from a friend who wanted to smash it to bits with a toffee hammer — but you can change that. There’s no gadget someone won’t hack.

The Edsel of music players, its very name signifying miserable failure, has broken the heart of even its greatest fan.

As slushpiles go, the stuff on Jamendo is surprisingly not an excretory avalanche of hopelessly stunted clueless ambition devoid of talent. In the bleepy shit, I was quite pleased by Warforge, EndZeit-Effekt and particularly Philos Deploys. The gimmick is that it’s all under one of the Creative Commons licences and artists get some cash from ads and donations. Somehow it hasn’t decayed into the last refuge of the musical bedroom masturbator. I urge you to check it out before it sucks.

(Before the Internet, only music industry professionals got their faces shoved in just how many bad records are released. Why do you think so many come to hate music? The worst musical slushpiles are songwriter competitions — worse than band demos because they don’t require the lifewaster to get anyone else to agree. “All unsolicited demo recordings to be submitted on SDHC or CompactFlash card of 8GB or over. Extreme III or better, please.”)

There’s cultural preservation, and then there’s the K-Tel blog. “A place for those K-Tel style classics.”

As reported in a few places (including The Register), Universal are making 43,000 tracks available for online purchase - US$0.99 a track, around US$10 an album.

The gist is that it’ll be using the Liquid Audio system, which is proprietary, Windows-only and DRM-friendly.

(more…)

After bringing suit in late May, the RIAA and NMPA have just obtained their dream settlement against Audiogalaxy: a strict opt-in system, where only approved tracks can be shared, and of course a huge wad of cash.

The suit against Streamcast over Morpheus is still pending.

Meanwhile, users looking for a spyware-free client for one of the remaining peer-to-peer networks might find what they’re looking for at Clean Clients, which offers de-loused versions of Grokster, KaZaA, Bearshare, Morpheus, Limewire and SongSpy. (And Audiogalaxy, for now-historical interest.)

Update: We hear tell the RIAA are apparently planning to sue someone over Gnutella … if they can find who to sue. Of course, suing the current developers (who are not the original developers) won’t do a thing to stop a fully open protocol with an open-source reference implementation available.

Kuro5hin has a nice history of Audiogalaxy up, written by one of AG’s programming team. Also talks about the RIAA suit in some detail.

(Kuro5hin has some good stuff. Read it.)

The recording industry is yet again offering a downloadable music service consumers can’t use - no MP3s, songs not transferable to portable music players and downloads that are no longer playable if the user’s subscription lapses.

Analysts consider the products of Musicnet (BMG/EMI/Warner) and Pressplay (Sony/Universal) unmarketable - the companies having failed to meet consumer expectations due to excessive paranoia and prices.

See also analysis from InternetNews and especially from MP3 Newswire. “Let’s just say that governments have bigger worries than chasing Napster clones right now.”

The point of this exercise in futility, from Velvet Rope poster ‘Thousandaire’:

“I worked for one of the majors, and it was a supposedly “tech savvy” label (that’s all I will say publicly about where I worked). Nobody in their new media division believed that the download programs would work, they viewed it as “we want to show that there is a dollar value on a download to establish damages.” The attempts to build systems can be viewed as a way to prove damages when suing other download services. (i.e. “you have 50,000,000 members, and that is cheating us out of $500,000,000 a month that they would otherwise be paying if you weren’t around). Heck, the labels made a business model out of suing the likes of MP3.com out of existence.”

That sounds alarmingly plausible. “These MP3s had a street value of one million billion zillion dollars …”