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August 24th, 2006 Return to Archive "If you
legally acquire music,
you need to have the right to manage it on
all other devices that you own."
- Steve Jobs, 2002,
Wall Street
Journal interview
"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it
on
all other devices that you own. And 'all' is not a typo meaning
Apple."
- Michael Robertson,
2006
I want to store every song in your music collection. And I want to do
it for
each and every person on the net so I'm swinging open the doors to
invite
everyone to use MP3tunes
today. It's an enormous technical challenge and a big
responsibility, but I hope by the end of this Minute you'll see the
vision.
More importantly I hope you'll take advantage of an absolutely free
music
locker to store your favorite tunes - up to 1000 songs (1gb sync
limit).
Late last year MP3tunes
began offering a music locker service called
Oboe. Oboe
comes with software for Mac/MSWin/Linux which gathers all the songs and
playlists you have and stores them online with a couple clicks of your
mouse. You can use the same software to keep all your PCs in sync so
that each has your complete music library. You can also play your music
from any web
browser in the world (even on a computer that is not yours) - so no
matter
where you go you have access to your music. Oboe also safely backs up
your music in case
anything happens to your computer (theft, virus, hardware failure,
etc).
My vision for a music locker goes beyond just playing music on PCs. An
Oboe Locker can zap music to every electronic device with speakers or a
headphone
jack. Turn on the device. Tell it who you are. Instantly have your
entire music
library. In the near future you'll have a dozen different devices in
your car,
home, or on your person that play your music. No single company is
going to have the best device in every
category. Apple
today may make the finest MP3 player, but the Apple/Motorola "ROKR" is
an
abysmal device that I bet Steve Jobs doesn't carry around in
his pocket.
My not-so-secret strategy is to amass a large number of music lockers
to compel electronics companies to build devices that will work with
this
open system - so you're always in control of your music. Most
manufacturers like to lock
customers in and maximize profits by
creating devices incompatible with other products. I want to achieve
the
exact opposite - enable compatibility between all devices so
you
can choose the best mp3 player, phone, home stereo,
PDA, etc. and know each will play ALL the music you own.
To make this a reality MP3tunes has published an API (a technical way
of saying we've made the instructions publicly available) that
allows any device in the
world to connect to a locker and play music. Already utilizing this API
are
devices such as DVRs (like TiVo)
and wifi devices (like Nokia's
770)
and the list is growing. We're
working with several electronic manufacturers to make your music
available on
phones and other devices.
By asking you to create
a music locker at MP3tunes I'm asking
you to store a big chunk of your data. I want to tell you how
we
will treat
your personal music at MP3tunes.
1) It's YOUR data and we won't lock you in. As a customer, you will be
able to
download your music and playlists making it possible to change services
whenever you like. I want to earn your business with good service, not
handcuff
you, making it difficult or impossible to move elsewhere.
2) You decide where your music will play, not us. Since we don't know
which
devices you like and those devices may change over time, we will be
open to ALL
electronic manufacturers that want to connect to your music locker.
3) We won't use patents or DRM (digital restriction management) to
block others
from using our system. Patents and DRM prevent different devices from
working
together.
Tens
of thousands of people have signed
up for lockers and our systems now hold more than 100 terabytes of
music (a
terabyte is 1000 gigabytes). This makes us the largest music
storage facility in
the world. It's a nice start, but still a tiny percentage of the
world's
music. So it's easy for you to get started we're making a free music
locker
available to everyone that holds up to 1000 songs. There is
no cost and no credit
card is required to sign-up. Oboe Free
is open to all users worldwide - not just the
U.S.
With this free locker you can sync music to multiple computers and you
can
stream via the nifty web locker interface. Oboe Free is a full featured
version of our $39.95/year locker so you can even stream to non-PC
devices.
There's a syncing limit of 1000 songs or 1gb, whichever comes
first, so depending on the
size of each song you may store a substantially fewer number of songs.
Sideloading
is unlimited. Oboe Free should
definitely be big enough to store all of your favorite songs and give
you a taste of
the power of the music locker. I hope you'll give it a try and help me
with my
vision to make ALL devices play the music you own.
p.s. My apologies to Emma Lazarus whose poem
I borrowed for the
title of this Minute.
-- MR
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