You’ve bought your first media player or iPod. You didn’t think it came preloaded with all your favorite songs, right? Of course you didn’t. Like their predecessors the cassette and CD players, MP3 players, personal media players, iPods and other handheld devices are not preprogrammed with songs. Any music you want must be purchased or otherwise acquired. Not all online music service providers charge a fee for their music but let’s take a look at the differences and what those differences mean.
If you’ve just purchased an iPod, your main source for purchasing music online is iTunes. But before you rush over to iTunes and pluck out your credit card to start downloading, you should know that all music files on iTunes are encoded with Fairplay Digital Rights Management. So what, right? Wrong. Fairplay DRM is coding that determines what type of devices you can play your music on. Fairplay DRM is also responsible to eating up to 8% of your battery’s memory every single time you play its music. It may not make perfect sense but understand that your new iPod is designed to last a specific number of years, currently the estimate is 2 and a certain number of full chargers; about 500. Now you’re getting it; you can shorten the life of your player and your battery with frequent and repeated use of Fairplay DRM encoded files. If you want to stick with iTunes consider investigating how to remove Fairplay DRM from your files to extend the life of your player and batteries.
If you have a different type of media player and are thinking you spent just about enough purchasing the player, there are many online music service providers who offer subscriptions at a monthly rate ranging from $7 to $15 where you can download as many songs as you like for that price. Yahoo and Napster or two of the more well know providers of such services and can be an excellent alternative to per song or per CD purchases. The variety doesn’t end there, however as sites like Yahoo and Napster offer not on music files that can be purchased and downloaded but other forms of media such as movies.
What you may find frustrating about online music services is that your purchase is actually a rental, not ownership. Although the price is comparable to a rental price, what may also be quite frustrating for you is that these same online music service provides place coding in the music that tells you where you can play your files. If this seems unreasonable, it may be but it is the standard of how online music service providers offer music for your media players, iPods and MP3 players.
In time, users may be able to affect change by demanding different music choices for their devices but for the time being, DRM is not slated to go anywhere which means you have to accept the limitations of what you can do with your files or remove DRM.
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