Kivus

With the recent release of the new Kanye West album and the new 50 Cent album, I figured it would be a good time to examine the current state of the highly publicized “DRM-free” music. My goal was simple, acquire DRM free versions of Kanye West’s _Graduation_ and 50 Cent’s _Curtis_. Unfortunately, this proved to be a near impossible task.

My first stop was iTunes. I didn’t think either Kanye or 50 were part of the EMI, but I figured it was worth a shot. It turned out both of these albums were only available in the standard iTunes DRM format, so I decided to move on. Stop #2 was Rhapsody. I tried for about 10 minutes to figure out how to purchase any song from Rhapsody, regardless of whether it was DRM-ed or not. I finally gave up and decided that the secret to using Rhapsody must be using their Windows software and moved on.

Stop #3 for me was gBox. I had heard about this site, but didn’t really know a ton. I was once again thwarted, as it turns out gBox is Windows only. Finally, I decided to give Wal-Mart a shot. I didn’t get very far, as the “windows only” message came up on Wal-Marts music store as well.

So after 4 different online music sites, I had actually only been able to browse 1 of them on my Mac. At this point, I normally have simply given up, however, I decided to get out one of my Windows laptops to see what those Windows-Only sites had to offer.

Rhapsody involved downloading their software. It wasn’t too bad, however, I would prefer being able to buy directly from the website. I did a search on Kanye first. It turned out that he was only available in WMA format. I did a search for 50 Cent and _Curtis_ came up, with the “Buy Mp3″ option. I took a closer look though, and saw it was the “edited” version. I clicked on the “unedited” version. No “Buy Mp3″ option. It appears this was only the case for his latest album too, as a number of his other “unedited” albums seemed to be available in MP3.

With strike 1 from Rhapsody under my belt, I moved on to gBox. Apparently, they have structured their site to revolve around the concept of “gifting” music, whether it’s you buying music for someone else or you making a list of music you want people to buy for you. It sounds like an interesting concept, however, their site is practically unusable. The interface is cluttered and confusing, while being particularly brutal for someone who wanted to just do a simple search by artist. Eventually I did find 50 Cent’s artist page, however, _Curtis_ wasn’t listed on it at all.

Down 0-2, I turned to my final hope: Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart site was easy enough to navigate. I tried 50 Cent’s album first. It came up immediately, _Curtis_, purchase Mp3. I figured I’d hit the jackpot. It was then I realized the flaw in my thinking. Wal-Mart only sells the edited versions of the CDs. So much like Rhapsody, I could only buy the edited version of _Curtis_ in Mp3 form. I didn’t bother even looking for Kanye’s CD since that would have been edited too.

So, after about an hour of playing around in the tubes of the inter-webs, I came up empty in my quest to get un-DRMed versions of Kanye West and 50 Cent’s latest albums. Since it was only 8:30, and I did want these albums, I hopped in my car, headed to Best Buy, purchased both albums at the release day price of $10 a piece, and then returned home to rip them into 256 Kbps AAC files. When it was all said and done, that was the only way I could reach my goal.

Over the weekend, it “Quechup” got some press for unleashing a tsunami of spam on their unsuspecting users. Unlike most sites that allow you to parse your web mail (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc…) address book, looking for contacts that are already members of the specific websites, Quechup sent out emails to everyone in the address book, asking each person to sign up. They got some negative press for it (as evidenced by this write up on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2007/09/02/quechup/) and caused a number of people to have to send out emails pointing out that it was Quechup that sent out the “sign up!!” SPAM not the individual.

With that as a the background, we have a troubling development on the social networking aggregator “UpScoop” (I’m intentionally leaving all links to the UpScoop site out of this post). Previously, their privacy policy read like this:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book. NOTE: Upscoop does not email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book. (http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uL5Uoiffy6UJ:https://upscoop.com/privacy_policy+upscoop+spam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

However, today, it now reads like this:

After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book.

Notice the difference? It seems clear that UpScoop plans to follow Quechup and start soliciting more people to come to their sites. The question is, will they honor their previous privacy policy or just start mining whatever database they’ve already collected of information concerning users?

With now what appears to be 2 examples of social networking sites doing “questionable” things with the address lists they find when mining address books, I think it’s probably time to stop using these automatic “friend finder” features. I’d love to give sites like Facebook the benefit of the doubt, but it looks like the trend is no longer to use your information to help you connect to your friends, but instead to use your information to help build up marketing databases. I can only blame myself for not recognizing that the later motivation was probably the driving force behind that feature all along.