Electronic music

This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on such stories, and he is rarely wrong.

Actually, it is still technically in the future tense. The day the music dies will be August 31, 2008.

But first, some backstory.

It was the Dark Ages, around 2004 or so. The iTunes Store was new and booming. Microsoft, in its bid to be the center of everything without having to deal with pesky “end users”, decided that the way to fight Apple was to create a developer platform. This developer platform would handle all the technical details of ensuring that people could “purchase” music files from a variety of online vendors, and play these music files on their (Windows) PC or on a variety of handheld music players. This developer platform would also ensure that such “purchased” music files could not be copied. This involves a lot of fancy math (encryption) which Microsoft was happy to license to companies running online music stores and companies making handheld music players, as well as including by default in all modern versions of Windows.

Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”

Microsoft named this developer platform “PlaysForSure”, and they (and their partners) ran many, many ads decrying the fact that music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store would “only” play in iTunes and on iPods. This was, technically speaking, true — and indeed it is still true, and it is why I have cautioned Dora and you and anyone else who would listen that you should never “purchase” anything from the iTunes Music Store that you might want to “own” longer than Apple was willing to allow. Nor should you “purchase” anything from a “PlaysForSure”-compatible music store, and for the same reasons, only with the word “Apple” crossed out and “Microsoft” written in in crayon.

To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” Apple has also promoted podcasts and other non-traditional sources of “things you might want to download onto our handheld devices where we make all of our money.” Steve is many things, but he is not an idiot.

To demonstrate the awesomeness of their developer platform, Microsoft opened their own online store, MSN Music, so they could compete directly with their business partners who also offered “PlaysForSure”-compatible music downloads. Because there’s nothing end users love more than fake choices.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — to whom I donate money every year because they are the digital embodiment of Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on” — has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft. Or something.

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

It is at this point that I am reminded of one classic call that I fielded when I worked at the AT+T Relay Service. One Friday night, a deaf person called Pizza Hut to, well, I don’t know, but probably to order a pizza of some kind, and the guy answered the phone with “Pizza Hut, we’re out of dough… can I help you?” Can you make me a pizza? No, we’re out of dough. Do you make anything else? No. Then you can’t help me! Does your music player play this music I “purchased”? No. Does your music player do anything other than play music? No. Then you can’t help me either.

Outside the EFF, a few of the smarter industry analysts (not this guy) have been predicting this doomsday scenario for a while. In 2006, Microsoft tacitly admitted that its PlaysForSure strategy wasn’t working when they announced that they were going to sell their own handheld music player (the “Zune”, which competes with the iPod… and with all the other handheld music players from Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” business partners) and start a second music service (which would directly compete with the iTunes Store… and Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” business partners… and Microsoft’s own MSN Music store). End users, it turns out, aren’t so bad after all; they just can’t be trusted to make the right choices.

Also, to ensure that no one could screw this one up except Microsoft, this new music service and new handheld music player would use an entirely new encryption system that was incompatible with “PlaysForSure”, and the encryption system would not be available for licensing. Any victim who had “purchased” music through Microsoft’s old MSN Music store had no upgrade/migration path to transfer those music files to their new Microsoft Zune; the victim would have to re-purchase the same music all over again. But the victims were assured that their existing MSN Music “purchases” would continue to work as long as they owned “PlaysForSure”-compatible devices. Except now they won’t, because Microsoft is turning off the servers that verify that the music they “purchased” a long time ago is still theirs to play.

As you might expect, the EFF is just bursting with joy at the prospect of rubbing salt in the wound and saying “I told you so.” This is their “I told you so” letter. I would join in their jubilation, but frankly I’m tired of being right all the time. It was fun for a while, but now it’s just depressing.