Hilary Rosen, former CEO of the RIAA, and political activist, has got a spot on the Huffington Post. In her maiden piece, she slathers the criticism on the iPod for not allowing consumers to purchase songs from retailers such as wallmart.com, rhapsody.com and msn.com. She says:

But not the iPod. Most agree it is the best quality player on the market even if the cheapest one costs a few hundred dollars. The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck

She fails to mention, of course that there is, quite simply, an encryption format war taking place. Microsoft wants you to purchase music from their supported sites (as in those listed above), whilst Apple wants you to purchase music from their site, whilst each locks the other out of their formats, making cross purchasing impossible. There is also, of course, Realplayer who owns the Rhapsody site; they want your money so that they don’t go down the drain. It may appear obvious to attack the messenger, but Rosen has spent years schlepping for the music industry, and it is only their interests that will be served by making the iPod open to all players: they will have a wider possible audience. But the users won’t benefit because it will (no doubt) be cumbersome and slow to use two seperate systems and maintain the Digital Rights Management (DRM) for both on a single player. Rosen hasn’t broken out of the mould of ‘record industry = good, consumers = bad’. The, formerly, most vilified woman on the planet has got one thing right: there are songs on those other services that you can’t get on the Apple service, but then there are also songs on the Apple service you can’t get anywhere else. And with over 70% of the market, it’s pretty likely you will be able to get more ‘other’ songs from the Apple store than from any of the other stores.
The other defense that Apple can claim is that, by not opening their own music player to anyone and everyone who’d like to take advantage of their success, they keep the supply chain closed and maintain the customer experience. It takes a lot of time to set up these stores and there is nothing forcing Apple to open themselves up to every bit-part player whose customers will then flood Apple’s support lines asking why their songs won’t work with a proprietary device. With an end-to-end iPod solution, it just works.

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