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What Apple Just Did: What if music had tools restrictions and a review process?
- armandososa 17y agoAnyway, developers have an advantage that musicians don't Musician: You know what? I'm done with you! I'm out! I'm going to pull my music out of your stinky store. Apple: No, you won't. We have an agreement with your media overlords (cof, cof) I mean, your record label.
- DannoHung 17y agoWell, they can do what Van Morrison did when he wanted to get out of a bad contract.
- wallflower 17y agoOr The Artist Formally Known as Prince My point here is good developers will have options - maybe not ones they like
- napierzaza 17y agoI'm not going to read this. Music is more easily compatible than software.
- S_A_P 17y agoapparently you have not been listening to todays autotuned pop music :P
- axod 17y agoBoring. It's actually a pretty good analogy though. Musician: hai! I play bongo music. Can I be signed to your label? Label: uh no, we're a rock label. You must use much guitars. Musician: This is outrageous! I must get the online world to feel outrage and boycot you. Can we stop all the whining and reactionary moral outrage on hackernews yet? Please? :( If you don't like it, go make your own iPhone/iPad instead of incessantly whining like some teenager that isn't allowed out.
- AndrewDucker 17y agoWe will stop being outraged as soon as outrageous things stop happening. In this case Apple is the music label, the music shop and the people that make the CD player. And that's the problem. If there were multiple app stores for the iPhone then nobody would care if Apple chose to filter the apps in their store.
- axod 17y agoI've been on HN for a long while now, so I believe I'm allowed to say this: I hate the idea of HN turning into Reddit. I hate 'news' stories about how we should all be outraged and boycot something. It's a ton of sheep following some ill advised, likely false rumor half the time. It's just kids in the playground trying to exercise mob rule. There was a news story, saying how Apple have changed their wording to disallow non-approved languages for developing apps. Great. That's news. But 100+ follow up 'opinion pieces' on it? srsly? Do we need all that crap? 10 out of the top 22 stories on HN are about this one item! The biggest mistake Apple has made IMHO has been opening the app store to all developers. They should have carefully selected chosen, quality partners, who would agree to play by Apples rules. At the end of the day though, the general public doesn't care one bit how Apple "treat" developers, so it's all fairly moot. If you take some principled stand by not making another worms game because you can't write it in clojure, you can be sure as hell someone else will just get on with it and write it in whatever Apple want.
- tvon 17y agoGraham's Law: As a HN discussion on community quality grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Reddit approaches 1. (that said, I totally agree)
- jamesbritt 17y agoJimbo's Law: As a discussion thread grows longer, the probability that someone in the thread will define a new law approaches 1.
- rfrey 17y agoInteresting perspective because it equates devs with musicians, which while not an intuitive comparison might be increasingly accurate. If it is, the future is not promising. Musicians have been getting screwed for years by record labels. They put up with it because their primary goal was to create, and find an audience. Being treated like a commodity by the record labels was aggravating and dehumanizing but didn't stop either music production or the practices of the labels. Maybe all of us 'rockstar' developers should be careful what we wish for.
- seertaak 17y agoAh, but musicians got screwed by Apple, too! (I might add that the record label bogeyman is clearly in no danger of disappearing from the collective consciousness of Hacker News.) Here's the thing: Apple is a platform company, and in essence, it's been in the business of screwing those that are hostage to its platform at least since its renaissance. Apple doesn't want those in its ecosystem to make much money, because it wants you to give it your money. That's why it said "Rip. Mix. Burn." with respect to musicians' work back in 2001 (to much cheering and adulation from developers): they were quite happy for you to get all your music for free (at the expense of the artists and labels), and instead allocate your disposable income to their hardware devices. When they opened iTunes, they added insult to injury by not allowing musicians to control how their music gets packaged and priced. I don't remember anyone complaining about the Apple's hard-driving tactics then. And lo, now they're treating third-party developers with the same contempt they previously reserved for musicians -- and suddenly the Hacker Community is up in arms. Plus ca change... > Maybe all of us 'rockstar' developers should be careful what we wish for. It's what you wished for ten years ago that put you in the quandary you now find yourselves in. Apple's stranglehold on music is what gave it the wherewithal to extend into other areas. Hacker News, you've just discovered what it feels like when someone's got you by the balls.
- Herring 17y agoWhat apps are worth buying anyway? I spent the first day with my ipad looking for an app that reads pdf for christsake. The entire platform seems to be just big media & games.
- mrtron 17y agoExcellent point. As much as I would want to ban auto-tune, it just isn't the right thing to do. Apple: Stop banning auto-tune.
- zacharypinter 17y agoThat's a good analogy. Seems useful for explaining the developer moral outrage to non-developers.
- nkassis 17y agoit won't beat the "OOOOOH SO SHINY" effect.
- api 17y agoI will keep repeating this until people get it: User interfaces matter! A lot!
- lr 17y agoThis is a horrible analogy. When you produce music it doesn't have to hook into an external API. Can badly produced music crash a device (aside from the user's ears)? No.
- wvenable 17y agoNo, it is a great analogy. Think of it this way, the record labels do what Apple does with it's review process -- ensure that 'quality' music is produced and distributed to listeners. But record labels do not limit what instruments can be used to produce that music. If Apple allows C, and they do, the choice of tool doesn't affect whether or not the device will crash.
- Terretta 17y agoA better analogy, since even non-musicians can hear the difference, would be Apple banning from iTunes any General Midi 1.0 song covers recorded using Sound Blaster cards with FM/OPL-3 chips, but still allowing music from Kraftwerk to Imogen Heap. Apps--or music--made with limited construction kits tend towards sameness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablum (In that sense, both Ableton and GarageBand could be considered construction kits, so perhaps a better analogy would be if iTunes banned sequenced music, only allowing music musicians personally play?)
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoServer seems to be down: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2010/04/09/what-apple-just-did/ http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://blog.joa-ebert.com... Edit - server's back up again.
- maxharris 17y agoThe analogy is broken. Humans don't interact with music in the same interactive way that they do with software. Music does not execute on your computer (except for DRM stuff, perhaps). I don't think you'll ever hear someone say, "This music is full of bugs! It keeps crashing on me."
- wvenable 17y agoThe analogy isn't broken because record labels and Apple both have a "review process". But record labels don't limit what instruments you can use. What Apple has done will not reduce the number of bugs or prevent crashing.
- doron 17y agoOne Platform to rule them all, One Language to bind them.one app store to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
- tumult 17y agoWrong analogy. It's more like a distributer (not label) telling its affiliates that for their CDs to be shipped, the songs on them must now have been originally written only in Mixolydian mode in the key of G with a 4/4 time signature. Anything else is not allowed, especially something that doesn't even use western musical scales or tuning.
- smackfu 17y agoAnalogies are useless for debate, no matter how good they are. Anyone who doesn't agree just provides a different analogy that supports their point better, and then the argument shifts to arguing which analogy is better!
- microcentury 17y agoA few years ago I worked as a journalist, and one of the major events at the time was news photographers hating the fact that newspapers were sending out normal reporters with DSLRs and telling them to take 200+ shots. Most of the time, they took a usable photograph. The pro news photographers said, 'But you can't expect an untrained person to take good photographs!' And they insisted that the papers stop sending out camera-armed news reporters. The thing with that, though, was that if you John Random Reporter couldn't take pictures of near-equivalent quality to a John Pro Photographer, the papers would stop doing it. But they didn't. If the photographers' point was true, they had nothing to worry about. But they knew they did indeed have something to worry about. The truth was that the amateurs could come close enough to equalling the pros that the trade off versus cost savings was worth it. There is a parallel here with closed versus open systems. We howl, 'You can't do that!! Closed systems canot possibly equal the innovation and development of open!!' And if that's the case, we have nothing to worry about. Quite possibly, though, that is not the case. The insistence on closed that seems so anathema to much of the history of software development may in fact be a good thing for the end user, and our howls of outrage nothing more than being called on something that is no longer true. That sense of threat would at least explain the inordinate number of HN stories on this topic.
- Legion 17y agoThe problem with this is that the erosion of quality is not necessarily noticed immediately, but the slow increase of dissatisfaction builds until people finally reach the quitting point. There's many instances of media where I look at older versions of the product and think, "man, why is this quality absent from their product today?". I didn't consciously notice it when the snowball was still near the top of the mountain. But eventually the snowball got big enough for me to bail.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jasonlotito 17y agoI know it's not your point, but something you said got me thinking about something else. "Closed systems canot possibly equal the innovation and development of open!!'" I always look at the internet as proof that an open system that was successful because it was open. The same with email. Both of these systems was more successful than anything Apple could every do. In the world of closed v.s. open, closed is generations behind in the innovation and success department.
- AndrejM 17y agoThe funny thing is, music has tools restrictions and a review process.