After announcing this week that they ALL their artists will only be allowing to have 90 second song clips on popular internet sites such as MySpace, Universal Music Group (aka the anti-christ) yesterday released that they will be releasing a subscription based music program called Comes With Music in collaboration with Nokia in the new year.
Doesn't sound to shabby at all. Consumers can just buy a Nokia product and get instant access to over 1 million songs while only paying a yearly rate. Hell, I would throw away my iPhone for that offer!
However, doing some more research and getting more opinions on the program, I have to say I actually hate Universal more.
Apparently, all the songs that can be accessed through the program are wrapped in DRM. For people out there who might not know what that is, it's Digital Rights Management. Anyways, this completely restricts anyone from sharing the songs and using them more than a pre-determined amount of times. Okay that's a set back however it gets worse.
Adding fuel to the fire, you can't burn the music onto a CD or listen to it on an iPod just on your PC. WHAT?!?!?! Oh, if you aren't pissed, it get's better.
In order to gain access for another year of the program you HAVE TO BUY A NEW NOKIA DEVICE which of course probably won't come cheap. On top of that, if you want to burn the music onto a CD it will require an upgrade purchase FOR EACH TRACK!
Holy crap, WOW, just, WOW.
This is a great idea and subscription based music is definitely the future however with all these restrictions in place, it's doomed to fail. Not to mention, this is a terrible way to start off on this idea. It will immediately turn people away from the product.
What are everyone else's thoughts on this this?
No comments:
Post a Comment