Sony announces Musicpass, the Betamax of digital music
Posted by Fred on January 7, 2008
Last week, Sony made minor news (call it a newslet) by finally joining the Release a Tiny Portion of their Music Catalog as MP3s Party, becoming the final major label to sell music without DRM. This week, Sony announced the details of their new Musicpass service, and it just may be the dumbest idea ever to come from Sony, which is saying a lot. Want to download a song via Amazon or iTunes? Nope, because that would actually make sense. Instead, you’ll have to schlep down to a bricks and mortar store and buy a Platinum Musicpass gift card for $12.99 or $19.99, take the card home, scratch off a little strip, go to the Musicpass site and input the code heretofore hidden by said little strip, and then download the songs and “exclusive bonus content.”
Sounds incredibly stupid, no? But wait, there’s more. You can’t buy the gift cards online, you have to have the little plastic rectangle. You can’t send a gift electronically - maybe Sony’s getting a kickback from Hallmark for all the cardboard rectangles people will buy to send the plastic rectangles as gifts. If you do buy a Musicpass card, it’s not just for $12.99 worth of digital tunes, it’s for a specific album. That means there are no singles, and the gift card suddenly became 97% more useless as a gift.
Let’s presume you manage to find an album you want among the 37 available at launch, say Britney Spears’ Blackout or Barry Manilow’s The Greatest Songs of the Seventies. You could go down to Best Buy and drop $12.99 on the gift card, jump through all the hoops Sony has placed in your path, and import the MP3s into iTunes. Or you could just buy the CDs for $12.99 or $13.99, stick the disc in your computer and let iTunes create its own DRM-less files. You’d lose the “exclusive bonus content” but gain a handy plastic disc to use as backup or turn into a Christmas tree ornament or coaster. Of course, in doing so, Sony would say you’ve stolen a copy.
It’s hard to envision the target market for this service, which makes one suspect Sony engineered it to fail.
Customer: That’s stupid.
Sony: Look, we didn’t make any money from our MP3 service, which just proves that people are thieves at heart who need to be held back with new laws. Or rootkits.
Customer: But your service is stupid, and could be improved by a bunch of blind, deaf monkeys typing their new business plan on manual typewriters lacking the letters “s” and “e”.
Sony: Thief!
[via BB Gadgets or Download Squad, I can't remember which because the utter stupidity of Sony's plan has broken my brain]
