This fight between Apple and Real over who can sell license music for the iPod is absurd. Let’s look at what’s happening, starting off with a quick recap of the story.
Apple sells iPods and sells licenses music through their iTunes Music Store. They make most of their money on iPods, and a little from the store.
Meanwhile, Real makes money by making it really hard to find their free player, and play around with the idea of making money off of music files the way Apple does.
So Real created a way for iPod owners to put the music they downloaded from Real on their iPods. This upset Apple, who makes money when people buy iPods, because it made the iPod more attractive to potential buyers. They vowed to stop Real from making more music available for their iPod.
In response Real, banking on all the customer loyalty they’ve built by hiding their free download, installing all sorts of popup adware and junk desktop icons, thought it would be a good idea to start a grassroots campaign.
What they didn’t count on was the fact that the mac faithful have grown by leaps and bounds thanks to reality distortion field generators embedded in white earbuds. The zealots responded including such biting bon mots as

You people are wrong, wrong, wrong. If we wanted ‘choices’ like yours, they wouldn’t have to be foisted on us. Most of us, given a real choice, would rather see you and your tactics go away. ‘Competition’ doesn’t give you any right to reverse-engineer when you feel like it, but come down on those that hack into your IP rights. It’s theft, pure and simple.

Apparently the author isn’t aware that Real doesn’t actually come to your house and install Harmony on your computer at gunpoint. He is correct in surmising that Real is acting hypocritically which is, you know, unheard of for a large corporation. Luckily Apple is above hypocrisy. OK that was a cheap shot, but how is this different from Apple using the reverse-engineered Samba in OS X?
Real also temporarily dropped the price of their songs to $0.49, which really pissed people off. I don’t know why people who don’t own Apple stock or get an Apple paycheck would be upset at the idea of getting the same product for half price.
This also lead to people saying that Real is losing money by selling songs for less than $0.99. This seems really weird to me, considering the cost of reproduction is nil. I know amateur music collectors who have more than Real’s 200,000 songs archived, I don’t think storage is that expensive. Bandwidth doesn’t cost $0.10/meg in the developed world. I’m not saying that they aren’t a loss leader due to licensing costs, I just think it’s weird to think that something virtual can be a loss leader. It’s not like they have to spend a lot of money mining raw materials.
As we move through closer and closer to sanity, we get people who call for Real to just license mp3s the way eMusic does. What seems to be missing is a call for Apple to do the same, which seems odd. Well not that odd, if you consider that a lot of these people are newly formed Mac fanboys who haven’t learned that Apple can be a bit of a bitch goddess. They’ll fight for Apple no matter what, thanks to the mind control properties of their white earbuds.
The funniest part to me is the fact that none of this should be unexpected. The whole purpose of DRM is to give companies artificial monopolies over their marketplaces. That’s right, that link is important enough for a whole sentence and then some.
Of course all intellectual capital is, is an artificial monopoly framework. DRM just takes that framework and making it more or less impossible to bend the rules.
To pick sides in this battle is absurd, as neither party is in the right. Both are dumb, both want to lock you in, both see you as a potential criminal instead of a potential customer and neither deserve your business. On that subject, does anyone have any complaints (aside from selection size) with eMusic?

[Update: Solution found by Ian – Choose “Manually manage songs and playlists” under iPod Preferences]
I picked up a slightly used iPod off a friend, taking advantage of his need for a 4G clickwheel. and am having a problem. I’ve found a ton of programs that enable me to get music off the iPod, but none that put music on the iPod, except for iTunes. Here’s what I want:
My iPod is “owned” (in both senses) by my computer at home. I then bring it to work and can move the music I’ve ripped at work and add that music to my iPod, in addition to the music I have from home. I don’t want to copy my iTunes library onto my iPod, bring it home, and add it to my home iTunes collection. I just want to put the music on it from whatever computer I happen to be in front of, without losing the music that’s already on the iPod.
But maybe that’s the point. Apple talks about the “digital media hub,” not the digital media network. They want to be at the center of your digital media universe, they don’t want your iPod talking to your Rio talking to your XBox talking to your set-top-box talking to your Linux system. In a digital media network, everything needs to be able to talk to everything, which means Apple loses its place of control.
And don’t think for a second it isn’t about control. Google isn’t finding it for me, but I remember reading a post (probably from Copyfight or The Importance Of…) where the author was told by an Apple rep that even if the music industry hadn’t asked for DRM on the iTunes Music Store they would have insisted on it. That puts them in a place of control, where their store and their player are only interchangeable with each other.
Real recently (and Power Computing before them) did a good job of pointing out Apples need for control by creating a way for the iPod to play music rented from another online music store. You can read this good summery of the silliness of Apple and Real fighting for control, but the bottom line is that Apple will fight tooth and nail for the power that comes with controlling digital music distribution.
Rants about Apple’s power struggle aside, is there any way to add music to my iPod from a computer that isn’t linked to it?

Not to milk my 15 seconds of fame too much, but I’m gonna put on my egoist hat for this post. eBay will be doing a trial wherein pre-approved sellers (AKA rights holders) will be able to auction off digital music (via Engadget). They very specifically note “a buyer of downloadable media through eBay cannot re-list or resell the media on eBay.” This must be how the person who forced Windex to put “Do not drink” on their labels feels.
USA Today has the story, including a quote from me about the aforementioned auction as well as reference to how I “fumed about it ever since on his Internet blog.”

I’ve been tracking the number of songs distributed from iTunes Music Store for the past 2472 hours, using the numbers on Apple’s homepage since noon on July 6. In 24 hours Apple distributed 483,091 songs, going from 96,995,792 to 97,478,883, averaging 20,128 songs/hour. At the current rate, my Excel spreadsheet (my first!) says that 100 million songs contest will end at 5:14 PM 12:55 PM EDT on July 12th. This is almost certainly wrong as sales will speed up as the number approaches 100 million, but this just gives a general idea of how many songs Apple distributes.
You can download the raw data or my Excel file if you like. I’ll try to update this post and the Excel file at least every 24 hours until Apple stops posting the numbers. Also, there’s no purchase necessary, you can enter the 100 million songs contest for free.
The contest ended at 1:21 AM EDT July 12, but they kept updating the numbers for another 13 hours. I’ve posted the final data and spreadsheet, which goes from noon on July 6th (96,995,792 downloads) to 2:30 PM on July 12th (100,192,509 downloads). If you need iTunes Music Store statistics, this provides a pretty granular view, although it’s most likely distorted due to the contest. Fin. [Last updated: July, 14 @ 9:00 AM]

I was talking to Ben from the RIAA Radar and Mixmatcher about independent music and he pointed out that Apple has posted an "Independant 100 Playlist" to their music store that claims to celebrate independent music, like Hillary Duff. He says that of the 100 albums 47 are from truly independent labels.
I’ll take his word for it because I’m not about to do a hand recount, but I thought that was pretty odd. Apple doesn’t seem to be doing much better with their user created iMixes either.

iTunes 4.5 has been out for a couple days, and it’s certainly a big refinement of 4.0. Of the new features, I think iMix is the most interesting, because it acknowledges one of the driving forces behind SongBuddy — that people who listen to music can drive the market. I would like to see them rewarding people who post iMixes in the same way Amazon rewards people who drive sales through recommendations, but I doubt their razor-thin margins would support a referral program.

The other big thing is that iTunes 4.5 reduces the use of music that you’ve spent money on (notice I didn’t use the word bought). As Jim Heid explains: You can now burn a playlist containing purchased music up to seven times (down from ten). And the old workaround of simply changing the playlist slightly does not work. LawGeek picks up on what this means: So after one year and 70 million songs, $0.99 now buys you less rather than more — seven hard burns instead of ten soft ones. What will Apple “allow” us to do with the music we “buy” next year? three burns? one? zero? If you don’t like the new rules, can you return your song to Apple to get your money back?

The problem with DRM is that you don’t own anything it protects. You’re renting, and the contract can change at any time. As a general rule, owning something is a far better choice than renting, but what happens when that isn’t available? Where can I buy a copy of the iTunes Exclusive Beastie Boys – Ch-Check It Out? By supporting this market, people are supporting the erosion of their rights as consumers.

So what can be done? Well personally I’m boycotting the iTunes Music Store until they start selling music until renting it. I’m not spending a lot of time (outside of this post, I guess) advocating that other people boycott it, I simply realized that the store is a bad deal financially and politically. However, if you do enjoy shopping there, you would do well to consider what changes Apple might make to the terms of use in the future, and what your options are if those changes affect you negatively. If you don’t want to lose more rights, be sure to let them know what you think before they change the terms of the deal again.