Listen to My Music

The music industry is considering doing away with digital rights management, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. This change of heart might be interpreted as a white flag in the D.R.M. battle, an admission that software-based restrictions on digital media are problematic, at least, enough to hamper the labels’ ability to do business online.

Or, you can read it, as I do, as a strategic ploy to undermine the iTunes Music Store, which, as Apple has recently admitted, has turned D.R.M. against the very people it was meant to protect. Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management framework, by tying purchases made through the iTunes Music Store exclusively to the iPod and to no other handheld media players, has allowed the company to create a de facto monopoly on digital music sales, in which it’s very difficult for the major labels to peddle their wares over the Internet through any other vendor.

Even though it’s still just a rumor, this newly enlightened attitude is an encouraging sign, right? If it actually comes to pass, though, I seriously doubt it will be accompanied by an embargo on the industry’s questionable habit of suing consumers who download music from unauthorized channels. Concessions tend to come piecemeal, not wholesale, in this kind of economic disruption.

Nor will it mean that I’ll be any freer to do what I really want to do with digital music: create and distribute the equivalent of mix tapes online. A steady stream of new music makes its way into my iTunes library, some of it protected by D.R.M., some of it from less reputable sources. I’m no taste maker, but I hear a fair amount of interesting stuff, and I’d like to share it with people (this means you).

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Hidden Fun in Software Design

Mac OS X Address BookMac OS X’s built-in Address Book is about as unglamorous a utility as any you can name. Aside from the fact that having a system-wide database of contacts that’s available to any application willing to hook into it is incredibly handy, very little about it could be described as interesting. It’s dead boring, in fact.

And yet, the other day, it surprised me. A colleague of mine sent, attached in an email, an updated vCard with his new home address. At first, I groaned a bit, because the relevant information — the new address — was buried inside of the vCard, hidden from view. I wanted it visible in the body of the email so that I could just update his contact information by hand. I was under the impression that, if I clicked on the vCard, it would launch Address Book and automatically add itself again to my contacts database — leaving me with two different cards for my colleague. Not a big deal, but an annoyance.

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NYT: Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music

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“ As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.” What goes unsaid in this article is that such a move would have the added benefit to major record labels of breaking the de facto iTunes Music Store monopoly.

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Optimizing for Design Unusability

Nicholas Felton of the New York design studio Megafone does some beautiful work, but the piece that’s really caught my eye is his Feltron 2006 Annual Report. Not a corporation, “Feltron” is Felton’s nom de guerre, under which he publishes, I suppose, personal projects and experiments. It’s hard to say because, like many designers’ indulgences, there’s frustratingly little information available at Feltron.com.

Doesn’t matter. Because this ‘annual report,’ a follow-up to a similar project he did at the end of 2005, is a work of delightful inventiveness. Using the pro forma conventions and banalities of corporate annual reports, Felton summarizes the notable trivia of the past twelve months of his life: the number of days he spent on vacation, the amount of time he spent on jury duty, the many remote geographic locations visited, and even a summary of plants he’s killed. All of it is executed in the kind of highly detailed diagrammatic vernacular that designers tend to fetishize — “info-porn” is the term — and with Felton’s precise, disciplined and, here anyway, his nearly unfailing aesthetic eye.

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