Song, by Toad

Sony amaze me. Ever since the Walkman they have consistently designed really nice physical products, but their marketing department has shown a surreal determination to completely ruin them by saddling every nice object with comically stupid systems and interaction strategies so ill-conceived that not even an mp3 player born of a lesbian mating between Jessica Alba and Diane Lane could survive their buffoonery.

Remember the disastrously poor Sonicstage software that crippled their excellent mp3 players? Well we are only just shot of that monster at long last. And remember their idiotic obsession on the ATRAC file format for these players? ATRAC was a good format, but insisting on their players using it meant that anything transferred to them had to first be converted, which took hours. Just insanity, when their players were very, very superior products indeed. The engineers must have wanted to roast the marketing department over a slow flame.

Now take their latest. As DRM is being abandoned the world over, Warner, Universal and EMI, three of the big four, of which Sony is the fourth, have all to some extent committed to making their music available DRM-free; on Amazon in the case of the first two and iTunes in the case of EMI. So Sony have decided to follow suit and jump into the DRMlessness but have a look at how they’ve decided to do it, and swallow that mouthful of coffee before you read:

Quoting from Wired:

Sony BMG announced it will release a mishmash of 37 albums in the unrestricted MP3 format, confirming last week’s report that the label would ditch DRM. Under Sony’s new plan, consumers would purchase a credit-card-like ticket from Best Buy, Target, Fred’s, Winn-Dixie or other outlets. The cards will have a number that must be entered into the MusicPass site, where the full album can be downloaded.

“The MP3 files delivered through MusicPass play on computers, as well as on all MP3 players, including iPods,” said Thomas Hesse, a Sony BMG sales president. “This makes them a simple, easy-to-use solution that will appeal to fans who already access their music on the internet, as well as to consumers who are just getting into the digital realm.”

I keep re-reading it to try and see where the part of of this plan that isn’t a hilarious disaster might be hiding. There are two potential fragments of sense in there, pointed out by this character on the Slashdot forums: firstly, this scheme would be open to children who would not need a credit card to access digital music; and secondly given the lack of necessary shelf-space, they could be available in a far wider variety of shops. So far so moderately sensible, although they are not unbundling the albums into individual tracks, which may not endear them to the children who might be their only really viable market.

The other thing worth bearing in mind is that somewhere like Walmart, where these things would be sold, is now just about the largest single distributor of CDs in the States. I don’t know if this is just amongst bricks and mortar retailers, but I read on Billboard that they have a massive 22% of the physical CD market, and big box retailers as a whole have a collosal 65% of the entire musical retail market in the States according to the Wall Street Journal – digital and physical. Basically, this deal smacks of an unholy amount of arm-twisting by physical retailers with an awful lot of clout, who would not be happy at being so neatly snipped out of the music purchase process. So I can see how it might have come about.

But the scheme itself? Pure, hilarious lunacy. Possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. One of the biggest reasons for the continued popularity of illegal downloading is that there has never ever once been a single viable alternative of similar quality offered by a legitimate source. If there was a reasonably priced, legitimate source for high-quality, DRM-free mp3s with a suitably extensive back catalogue, then my bet is it would make a significant dent in illegal downloads, because people just are less comfortable doing illegal things. But anything that falls short of that quality of service is simply pointless – given the ineffectiveness of legislation, what is the incentive supposed to be? An inferior product for more money.

In this case, instead of just going to one of dozens of torrent sites and downloading the whole lot for bollocks all, you are expected to go to the shop and instead of just buying the CD for the same price and ripping it yourself in whatever format or quality you choose, you buy the card for $12, go home, go to their site, scratch the card, fill in the code, and then download the music as a 192 Kbps mp3 file. On other words, the worst of both worlds: you still have to go to a shop, and then also have access to an internet connection, and the quality of the final listening experience is inferior.

I have worked for plenty of big companies as a consultant and I know just how these decisions come about. Instead of taking fifty steps towards a sensible goal they take fifty steps, each of which is knocked subtly off target by toadying to the whim of a director, or vocal retards in important meetings, or the inability to achieve consensus amongst large groups of people, or the impossibility of getting every single stakeholder to take part in every important decision for logistical reasons. The result: you are still fifty steps on, but you haven’t ended up at a goal, you’ve just ended up wherever these random fifty steps took you, and after all the meetings and all the investment you end up releasing the product because, well, what do you do, start again? This despite the fact that you have created something that does absolutely everything no better than reasonably, and nothing at all Very Well Indeed.

And then it fails, and you make an announcement that consumers aren’t ready for DRM-free mp3s because you’ve tried to make them available and the market clearly just isn’t there.

That is why it will not be a big company that solves the problem of making money in the digital era, it will be a small label or an individual artist or a small entrepreneurial enterprise or an artists’ collective. It may then be bought or hastily adopted by Sony, but will Sony solve the problem themselves? Absolutely, categorically no.

Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind (Original NYC Recording – see below)
The Detroit Cobras – Stupidity

And of the best songs ever, from one of my favourite albums of all time, and most appropriate as it happens:
Grandaddy – He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot