We have discussed earlier how different generations approach media like books, movies, music. The young today are comfortable with streaming services:
…they have never had to store anything, never had to back it up. They lament a TV show or music album no longer being available because a service chose to not renew a licenss, but they move on quickly because they know it’ll just show up sooner or later on another service. Impermanence is not a bug, it’s just part of the experience.
But even in the cases where they do ‘buy’ a song or a book or a movie or a TV show, they never own it – it’s at best a license for an unpredictable amount of time. They are renters, digital tenants:
Unlike many other streaming services, Prime Video not only gives you access to selected content with your monthly subscription, but it also allows you to rent or buy movies. The latter is explicitly advertised as a purchase and its price reflects that… [but instead] Amazon grants you a “non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, limited license, during the applicable Viewing Period, to access and view the Digital Content in accordance with the Usage Rules, for personal, non-commercial, private use.”
In addition,
The company also states that it cannot be held liable “if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.” In other words, you are not buying a product, you are simply “licensing” the right to view the content on Amazon’s platform and your access can be revoked at any time.
This is true of your collection on the Kindle and Apple Books stores too. It’s also true of digital games that can only be played on a particular platform and need connectivity to a vendor-run server, like Valve’s Steam. It is very like the ownership issues with connected appliances we discussed only a few days ago.
The iTunes Store may be the big exception here. It has always offered DRM-free purchases of songs. When you buy a song from the iTunes Store, you download the MP3. You can back it up to an external hard drive, you can play it in a different music player, you can sync it to a non-Apple MP3 player – no problem. It truly is yours to own. The Store is such an outlier in this space that I wonder how long it will last.
End note: At a time when the music industry had realised how big the piracy problem was, I recall Steve Jobs made the argument by saying that the time taken locating, downloading, adding ID3 metadata to and organising an album’s worth of music files versus the cost of downloading it from iTunes (USD 9.99) meant you were making less than minimum wage – that you should just pay the USD 9.99 and earn more in that time. It was so simple and powerful that it has stayed with me nearly twenty years later.
2 replies on “Digital Tenancy”
Hi Rahul. If one could play any content that we downloaded outside of iTunes, in any format supported by Apple devices, then that really would’ve been Apple not binding customers to its ecosystem (one can do this with some hacks, though).
But because Apple allows content in formats of a higher quality to be downloaded only from iTunes, they’re acting as middlemen between customers and content. True, one can “own” the song, but only in Apple’s ecosystem (without hacks).
So effectively, Apple has merely shifted the “licensing” from the content itself, to the ecosystem. Tomorrow, Apple can — theoretically — render the iTunes of a user inoperable. That is the familiar outcome of a licensor pulling the plug, isn’t it ?
I don’t get it – I can literally search for the MP3 in my iTunes folder, copy it onto a USB drive and play it in my car’s music system. Nothing hack-y about it. Or am I missing some other point you’re making.