I’m not buying music from the iTunes Music Store anymore. This is a specific outcome from being a director (independent; Alsop Louie Partners is not an investor) of Sonos Inc. Sonos makes a very cool and increasingly popular system for distributing music around your house and playing different music in each room. I won’t make an ad for the system here. (I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t suggest that it is an excellent Christmas gift for the well-off computer geek who loves to listen to music.) But the one relevant aspect is that Sonos cannot play music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.That’s because that music is protected by Apple’s so-called “Fairplay” digital rights management (DRM) technology. Unfortunately, Apple won’t license Fairplay. So Sonos can’t get from Apple what it needs to be able to play tracks purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Sonos, of course, does not promote the acquisition of music illegally and is perfectly willing to pay reasonable licensing costs to use other companies’ technology to be able to play music legally. But Apple just isn’t willing to license the technology.  

 

Once I realized that about 20% of my music database is out of the reach of my Sonos system, I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store. I still use the iTunes Store for other media; for instance, I recently bought the episode of “Lost” where Ecko was killed, since my TiVo had mysteriously missed recording that episode. But I don’t buy music from the store; instead I borrow copies of the same music I already paid for from other users using the Acquisition peer-to-peer sharing system for the Macintosh. I already paid for these titles and am perfectly within my rights to have copies that do work on my system. (I won’t go into how I also use Acquisition to try out new musicians before deciding to actually buy their CD.)

But here’s the real point I’m wanting to get to: Since I stopped buying music from the iTunes Music Store, I’ve also noticed that I am using my iPod a lot less. I listen to music in my car; I’ve gotten sick of trying to make the radio interface for my iPod work and have just defaulted to listening to the radio. (I hate it but that’s a separate post.) I listen to music on airplanes; I’ve realized that it’s much easier to plug my Bose headphones into my computer and listen to iTunes rather than the iPod, since I always have my computer open on the airplane. I listen to music sitting in my living room; and I’ve taken to listening to music on Sonos at home.

The real point: I’m not using my iPod nearly as much as when it first came out, when Fairplay hadn’t been deployed, when Sonos hadn’t been invented and when I had a car with a tape-play instead of a CD (for the iPod interface). I’m using my iPod about 20% of the time I used to, but I’m not missing it at all. More than 70 million units later, maybe the iPod does have an end of life. Hmmm….