Well, this is an interesting idea. According to CNET News, Microsoft is working on some serious changes to its online music service, including this doozy of a feature:

The tentative features of the new service–which is still under development–include advanced community aspects and playlist-sharing. But sources say Microsoft is also considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they’ve purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod.

OK, now I want the recording industry to really, really think about the implications of this. If I pay a digital music provider to download a track, I’m actually paying two fees. One is a royalty to the artist and the publisher, which is passed through the music service. The other is a fee to the music service for providing the media to me. In this case, Microsoft is apparently arguing that you and I should only have to pay once for the digital rights to a song, regardless of the format it comes in. If iTunes passed along a payment on my behalf, then I have purchased the rights to play that tune, and Microsoft or Rhapsody or Yahoo or whoever should be able to provide that track to me as well. All they have to do is establish that I have already paid for the digital rights to that song.

Here’s where the argument gets sticky. Right now, when I buy a CD, I have the right to rip a copy of it to my hard disk for my personal use. I can make a backup copy of the CD media. I can make a custom mix of tracks, burn it to a CD, and play it in my car. I can copy all those tracks to my personal music player. Using the logic of this rumored Microsoft proposal, I already paid for the digital rights to this song when I bought the CD; my payment was passed to the publisher and artist by the record company from whom I bought the CD. So why can’t I get Microsoft-format digital copies of any music in my CD collection, just by proving to Microsoft that I own the original CD?

Can any of the copyfighters out there tell me what’s wrong with this idea?

(Thanks to Digital Media Thoughts for the pointer)

The first five symphonies in the Beeb’s remarkable free download series are available, but only for a couple more days.

The remaining four symphonies will be broadcast and made available for download later this month.

Don’t dilly-dally!

Steve Rubel passes along this tidbit:

Z100 – a popular Top 40 station in New York – has debuted some podcasts. To my knowledge, they’re one of the few Top 40 stations that have done so. They may even be the first. What’s unique is that they include interviews with big stars like Kelly Clarkson and J-Lo.

Why should I care what some Clear Channel station in New York is doing? Why should anyone do a damned thing to promote a sleazy corporation that is doing its best to concentrate media in this country and discourage diversity? Kelly Clarkson is raw material for the pop culture sausage machine. Same for J-Lo. In a world where there are literally thousands of artists who are doing great new stuff that isn’t controlled by the RIAA or Clear Channel, why should I download a commercial-filled 20 minutes of pabulum from these guys and play it on my iPod?

Steve’s instincts are normally good, but this “news” is laughable.

(PS: If you go to Z100’s Web site, be sure to check out the banner full of sleazy ads at the very top of the page. Low mortgages rates? Bad credit refinance! Online dating! It’s like they dumped a whole mailbox full of spam into a single banner. Nice respect for your audience, Clear Channel.)

Update: Just to clarify, I think Steve Rubel is smart, well informed, and a great commentator on developments in the blogosphere. That’s why his blog is in my RSS reader. I just don’t share his positive outlook about Clear Channel. See the comments for more.

Wired News has details of the latest move by the FM radio industry to survive in a world where they’re increasingly becoming irrelevant:

From Seattle and San Diego to Baltimore and Buffalo, more than a dozen big-city radio stations have converted to a format known as Jack-FM over the past two months. On Friday, even legendary New York City oldies station WCBS-FM dumped ’60s rock and joined the ‘Jack’ parade.

Boasting they’re “like an iPod on shuffle,” the new stations typically dump their disc jockeys in favor of huge song playlists that mimic a well-stocked portable music player.

The Jack format, which is already spawning imitators, could be a key to FM’s survival as an alternative to satellite radio, internet radio and MP3 players.

This just reeks of desperation. It’s also a way to get rid of employees. And it’s going to turn listeners away, too.

I rarely listen to the radio anymore, and I never listen to stations that have a “format,” where some suit tells the serfs which buttons to push. Shuffle is fun once in a while, but it also results in jarring transitions between tracks that shouldn’t be played back to back. Being a DJ (a real DJ, not a droid on a “formatted” station) is a skilled profession, practically an art. Building a playlist that makes sense takes talent and experience and a real ear for music. Sadly, people who have those skills don’t have many opportunities to practice them anymore.

Anyone wanna bet how long this lame format lasts? I give it 18 months, tops.

This meme arrives via Steve Gilliard and Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise. No one invited me to do this, so I don’t feel obligated to abide by the last item on the list and invite three other people to do the same. Besides, that feels too much like a chain letter. Anyway, here goes:

1. What is the total volume of musical files on your computer?
12,681 in My Music, plus 2,837 in the Live Music folder, plus about 2,000 more that are waiting to be decompressed, tagged, and imported as WMA files. All in all, it’s about 140GB of music.

2. What are you listening to right now?
Kasey Chambers Live at the 2003 Telluride Bluegrass Festival

3. Last CD you bought?
Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born

4. Five songs you listen to a lot and which mean something to you

Ry Cooder, Borderline
I could’ve picked 20 other Ry Cooder songs; this one is melancholy and wise all at once.

Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
“I know one thing – nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joe Diffie, Not Too Much to Ask
We played this song at our wedding; it still chokes me up a little.

Richard Thompson, Vincent Black Lightning 1952
‘Cause it’s just a damn good story of outlaws and loss.

Steve Earle, Rich Man’s War
Perfectly expresses my feelings about the war in Iraq in less than 3-1/2 minutes.

5. Three people I invite to go next

Go ahead. You try.

Loyal reader Ken Gardner has been pestering me to broaden my musical horizons and listen to music written by guys who have been dead for hundreds of years instead of those who are either still alive or died in the past 20 years. “For me there are also only two kinds of music,” says Ken. “Anything written by Beethoven and all other classical music.”

Well … The BBC is making an offer neither Ken nor I can refuse: all nine of Ludwig van Beethoven’s sypmphonies, in digital format, as performed by the BBC Philharmonic. Free.

The live broadcasts start on June 6, and the downloads are available for a week or so after each broadcast. Cool!

(Thanks to Wendy at Legal Tags for the pointer.)

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week’s list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics):

1. Strong Winds, Graham Parker, Passion Is No Ordinary Word
2. Possession, Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy
3. House Carpenter, Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased)
4. Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, Willie & Lobo, The Music of Puerto Vallarta Squeeze
5. He’s Gone, The Grateful Dead, Live at Winterland, October 17, 1974 (bootleg)
6. As Long As It Matters, Gin Blossoms, Congratulations … I’m Sorry
7. Looking Forward, John Gorka, Temporary Road
8. Power of Two, Indigo Girls, Swamp Ophelia
9. Bodas de Oro, Manuel Galban and Ry Cooder, Mambo Sinuendo
10. 12 Bar Blues, NRBQ, Peek-A-Boo: The Best of NRBQ (1969-1989)
11. No Place Away, Greg Brown, Dream Cafe
12. I Ain’t Ever Satisfied, Steve Earle, Live at the Bluebird Cafe (with Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt)
13. Over You, Aaron Neville, Treacherous: A History of the Neville Brothers
14. Jolly Roger, Roger McGuinn, Born to Rock & Roll
15. Caldonia, B. B. King, How Blue Can You Get? Classic Live Performances 1976-1994
16. Hey Madeline, Kyf Brewer, Bright Jewels
17. Garden of Earthly Delights, XTC, Oranges and Lemons
18. Paul’s Tune, The Clash, London Calling, 25th Anniversary Edition
19. My Shit’s Fucked Up, Warren Zevon, Live in Nashville, April 11, 2000 (bootleg)
20. Love Art Blues, Neil Young, Archives Be Damned, Vol. 1 (bootleg)

[*] My one exception is to limit each artist to one track per list. If the same artist appears a second time, I skip over that track. Graham Parker’s superb “Soul Shoes” and an extra track each from Willie & Lobo and Bob Dylan would have made this list otherwise.

I’m a big fan of the Dave Matthews Band, especially the sense of community that I feel at a show by the band. There’s a lot of the feeling that the Grateful Dead had in their heyday.

So I was surprised, to put it mildly, to learn that the latest DMB album, Stand Up, incorporates digital rights management that makes it difficult to rip into digital format for playback on a PC or portable music player. This is apparently an especially big problem for anyone using an iPod with Windows. Judging by what I’ve read on the band’s site, it’s no problem to rip to a Mac using iTunes, and it’s no problem to rip to a PC using secure WMA format. But the process for getting tracks into iTunes on a PC means ripping them into secure WMA first, then burning a CD, and then ripping the burned CD using iTunes.

This is, to put it mildly, bullshit. The band trusts its fans enough to allow them to tape live shows and exchange the tapes for free. It makes a fortune off its live performances. Most of the taping community enthusiastically supports the band by buying its “official” live releases and studio CDs. And most importantly, this form of DRM simply doesn’t work. All it does is turn off the band’s most loyal fans. I won’t allow DRM-protected tracks on my PC.

Microsoft isn’t the only corporation in bed with this band. AOL Music did an exclusive webcast of the live DMB show from New York City’s Roseland Ballroom earlier this month. I had no problem playing it back in Internet Explorer (after installing an AOL ActiveX control), but Firefox refused to play the archived show even after I installed the required plug-in.

I won’t be buying this CD. And observant readers will notice that I didn’t link to the CD’s Amazon.com listing, which means I won’t be selling it, either. Dave, you need some new technical advisors.

Tim Coyle is out with a comparo between his cable company’s (practically) free DVR and his Media Center PC. He covers a lot of the same ground I covered in my three-way comparo back in March and reaches pretty much the same conclusion:

Media Center comes out ahead by leaps and bounds. Media Center has much more program information available and an overall better TV guide and user experience. While a nice try by the Cable Company, the TV guide information is lacking and the remote needs a lot of help.

Thomas Hawk points out what Tim missed:

A huge point missing though is HDTV and while Tim acknowledged that his Adelphia box was capable of recording HDTV, his Media Center box is not capable of recording HDTV cable TV …

I bet if you polled HDTV users and asked them would they give up their HDTV in exchange for a DVR with superior features and functionality you would get over 90% of them who would never do it. Once you have seen HDTV you can’t go back.

Tim has a standard analog 20” TV. For him, recording high definition signals isn’t an issue. I’ve got 32” analog TVs in the living room and the master bedroom. On those screens, the analog recording from the Media Center box is just fine. In my den, the big HDTV screen thrives on the beautiful digital hi-def image, but we save that for special occasions.

In my opinion Thomas overestimates the appeal of HDTV. If you force me to choose between HDTV and a DVR with acceptable standard recording quality, the DVR wins every time. A gorgeous picture that is only available on someone else’s schedule is worthless to me. I’d rather downgrade to a standard signal than be forced to rush home on Sunday night so I can catch the latest episode of Deadwood or stay up till midnight to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Not to mention the capability to back up a play it again when we miss a crucial snippet of dialog. (“What’d he say?”) The idea of everyone in America sitting down in front of their TVs to watch the same show at the same time was fun in the days when Lucy and Uncle Miltie ruled, but it’s just quaint now.

My cable company’s DVR is good enough. And as they say, good enough is the enemy of excellent. Despite some annoyances, the Scientific Atlanta DVR I get for (practically) free from the cable company combines the HDTV and DVR functions and thus “wins” in my household. It makes me willing to use their box for programs that I want to watch on the big screen in the den. But I still record three or four times as much content on the Media Center box, mostly old movies that don’t need to be seen on a big screen to be enjoyed. And I can’t wait till this fall, when I really really really hope that one box will do it all.