sideshowbob
Trisha
julian2002 said:surely music is whatever the listener wants it to be, art, mood, background or soundtrack it's up to the listener. the delivery medium doesn't effect this. drm is a seperate issue altogether imho.
No, music is art, regardless of how the listener chooses to listen to it. And there's no question that the medium changes a listener's relationship to music, in the case of downloadable music, in a very direct way - if DRM gets its way, most listeners (those who aren't tech savvy) will find their rights to play that music on anything but the machine they downloaded it to are extremely restricted. This is why MS is putting so much effort into Windows Media, and Apple into iTunes - it isn't about finding new technologies to improve the "downloaded music experience", it's about winning the battle to implement DRM; for the software companies, the license fees for winning that battle are, potentially, hugely lucrative. For the ordinary consumer of music, it's a grim prospect, as DRM offers precisely nothing positive to us. Those complacent enough to see the future as simply a brave new world of shiny technology, ever onward marching, miss the fact that, as GTM says, technology can have its negatives. To talk about the negatives isn't to be a luddite, it's a social responsibility.
-- Ian