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Comment by mod50ack | Hacker News Reader

The explanation is that CDs came along before DRM was a thing. The industry could not break compatibility with over a 15 years' worth of CD players, especially since people had them in their cars, etc. The home playing software always had the ability to rip CDs; you could do that long before iTunes was a thing. It was only a matter of time before record labels gave up on DRM.

Now, since CSS was cracked, DVDs are, in practice, no harder to rip. But a company like Apple can't ship a DVD ripper in iTunes.

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There has been plenty of attempts at copy protection on CDs. Some more successful than others.

Digital-only downloads of music was also one of the early adopters of DRM. But one of the problems is that music needed to be portable in a way that games and movies weren’t (yet). Then as smart phones, WiFi and mobile internet took off, digital downloads got replaced with services like Spotify. These days most music consumption is done via streaming services.

What helps with music, though, is the core group of audiophiles who keep CD and vinyl. They aren’t going to be around forever though. I used to be one and even I’ve given into the convenience of Spotify in recent years. I can count on 1 hand the number of times I’ve played vinyl in the last 5 years. And I threw out almost all of my CDs when I last moved house.

> There has been plenty of attempts at copy protection on CDs. Some more successful than others.

Yes, but they're fundamentally incompatible with the CD standard.

I'm not denying that digital downloads for music were the first big use of DRM. But in that case, it was perhaps even more futile than in other applications.

> Yes, but they're fundamentally incompatible with the CD standard.

Not really “incompatible”. More like hacks around the standard.

If they were incompatible then CD players wouldn’t have been able to play those CDs.

> I'm not denying that digital downloads for music were the first big use of DRM. But in that case, it was perhaps even more futile than in other applications.

It’s easy to say that in hindsight but there was a point in time where it felt like DRM in music would eventually win out.

Ironically it was the subscription model that saved us here. Because those that wanted convenience went with services like Spotify. And those that wanted to persistent copies stuck with CDs and vinyl.

> I used to be one and even I’ve given into the convenience of Spotify in recent years.

What convenience? Unless you're constantly going out to listen to new music, which most people aren't, Spotify is a raw deal indeed. You can easily stream the music you own through various means, and you don't have to pay a monthly sub to do it.

Technically you don’t have to pay for a monthly sub for Spotify either ;-)

Also, it’s not a raw deal. In 1995 a single CD cost about $30 in today’s money (look up old Best Buy ads and you’ll find $16-18 CDs). Buying a Spotify subscription is equivalent cost to buying only 4 albums per year in 1995. It would be very easy to listen to more new music than that every year.

If you want proof, look at revenue charts for the music industry. Streaming music still hasn’t reached the previous level of revenue generated in the pre-Internet era when you adjust for inflation, despite the global population increasing significantly since then.

You're asking about Spotify, but the situation is the same with Apple Music (the streaming service, not the purchase-digital-files thing).

I have an enormous ripped collection of digital music from my similarly enormous collection of CDs. Just managing that is a hassle, especially when it comes to curating the subset of things on my phone -- and on my wife's phone.

I initially signed up for Apple Music MOSTLY to give my wife easy access to whatever she wanted on her phone without requiring her to go to the office, plug her phone into the media computer, etc. And honestly, for $12-15 a month, I'll make that deal. It's a good deal for ME, too.

The other fun thing about at least the Apple offering here is that they have a "matching" service built in, so if you have some random local bands in your iTunes library, YOU CAN STILL ACCESS THOSE VIA APPLE MUSIC because AM will upload them into their cloud and allow you to access them because you have them in your local library. This is super cool; I don't think anyone else does this.

And yes, finally, the new music discovery thing is pretty great, too. I credit access to an all-you-can-eat music service with helping me stay curious and interested in discovering new music in my 50s. If I read an article about some random band, and think "gee, I wonder what they sound like?", well, I can play it right now. That's powerful.

> so if you have some random local bands in your iTunes library, YOU CAN STILL ACCESS THOSE VIA APPLE MUSIC because AM will upload them into their cloud and allow you to access them because you have them in your local library. This is super cool; I don't think anyone else does this.

YouTube Music has this feature too - my library still has stuff I uploaded over 10 years ago that I can stream on my phone.

Spotify has a local files mode that used to be pretty good and allowed for syncing devices, but they've crippled it, made it harder to use, and hidden all references to it deep in submenus (at least this was the state of things the last time I used Spotify, it's been a couple years since I subscribed, I wouldn't be shocked if they've killed it entirely by now).

You’re talking about cost, not convenience.

I have hundreds of CD's that I bought that have games on them. If it had starforce it was a good chance it was an UbiSoft game. That company has always been very hostile to copying of its products. Especially to its paying customers.

Good 'ol Ubisoft CEO calling his customers thieves.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/75408/ubisoft-says-piracy-...

There's an interim here between CDs and streaming that you partially mentioned, and the one that fit between them chronologically. Digital jukeboxes, like MP3 players and harddrive home media systems. Although the modern equivalent would be a micro SD card and a phone. Buy two micro SD cards for redundancy, update your library as you get new songs. If you get direct downloads you get thousands of songs, many of which aren't available from streaming services, and nothing can take them away from you aside from time, physical media theft, or data corruption. It's a tradeoff of frontloading the effort versus dealing with it on the fly.

> The industry could not break compatibility with over a 15 years' worth of CD players, especially since people had them in their cars, etc.

Sure, not at first. But how long has it been since most people interacted with a CD player now? Most teenagers haven't, ever.

Yet here we are, music is still being sold on CDs.

Not that I want to put the music industry on some kind of pedestal as a paragon of virtue in the digital age, but it's certainly odd and noteworthy.

> Now, since CSS was cracked, DVDs are, in practice, no harder to rip. But a company like Apple can't ship a DVD ripper in iTunes.

DVD quality is not really of sufficient quality for most consumers today, though. Meanwhile, CD quality continues to match or exceed modern streaming services.

> Sure, not at first. But how long has it been since most people interacted with a CD player now? Most teenagers haven't, ever.

Yeah, but it's a lot harder to switch from a DRM-less digital download format to a DRMed one. Who in their right mind would choose the DRM store, then?

Oh, but this is also sort of what they did, because Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot have DRM. Not that it's unbreakable or anything. But they have it — for streaming.

> DVD quality is not really of sufficient quality for most consumers today, though. Meanwhile, CD quality continues to match or exceed modern streaming services.

Yes, but I was talking about 20 years ago. DeCSS had come out in 1999, but libdvdcss was released in 2004. It has been pretty easy to rip a DVD for someone in the know since then.

Much like CDs, Blu-rays (especially 4K Blu-rays) are of better quality than you'll find on most streaming platforms. Blu-rays are pretty much rippable, too, but far fewer people have a Blu-ray drive, and most people don't care.

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