Saturday, December 7, 2002
Liquid Audio To Evaporate
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
I know this isn't Pocket PC related, but the ability to play music on our devices is a key reason for owning them for many people and where and how we get our music is of interest. Liquid Audio decided to close up shop and pay out their remaining cash, approximately $57 million, to existing shareholders and call it a day.
"Liquid produces software that prevents digital song files from being distributed illegally. Although the company was lauded by the recording industry for its copy protection technology, it could not compete with free file-swapping software such as Kazaa, Morpheus and the now-defunct Napster. Liquid also was unable to offer enough songs for people to purchase due to the recording industry's slower pace of releasing digitally encoded versions of their copyrighted songs."
Oh well. Another digital library with a small selection that required most of your music to be played on the device that downloaded it down the tubes. At some point these people are going to figure out that what draws a lot of people to the file swapping services is not the free music but the ease with which you can put the music on your PC, a CD or your portable music player. I know that a lot of the people are on the peer-to-peer networks for the free music, and that is a shame. They will find a way to keep getting the music free. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have handcuffs put on us by the music industry while we are chained to our PCs listening to their time limited tracks.
Oh, if you liked Liquid Audio's DRM, don't fret. "In September, Liquid sold its digital encoding patents to Microsoft for $7 million." :?
One more thing. Those of you that have Liquid Audio tracks on your PC. What do you do now? As long as you keep your existing PC and operating system, you are OK. Get a new PC or upgrade to a new OS that the Liquid Audio player is not compatible with, I guess you lose your music. This is another reason that I won't bother with any solution that requires a proprietary player. Certainly not that Sony garbage. Not that I think Sony is going under anytime soon, but they will eventually drop support for Label Gate in favor of something else and your music will again be gone.
"Liquid produces software that prevents digital song files from being distributed illegally. Although the company was lauded by the recording industry for its copy protection technology, it could not compete with free file-swapping software such as Kazaa, Morpheus and the now-defunct Napster. Liquid also was unable to offer enough songs for people to purchase due to the recording industry's slower pace of releasing digitally encoded versions of their copyrighted songs."
Oh well. Another digital library with a small selection that required most of your music to be played on the device that downloaded it down the tubes. At some point these people are going to figure out that what draws a lot of people to the file swapping services is not the free music but the ease with which you can put the music on your PC, a CD or your portable music player. I know that a lot of the people are on the peer-to-peer networks for the free music, and that is a shame. They will find a way to keep getting the music free. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have handcuffs put on us by the music industry while we are chained to our PCs listening to their time limited tracks.
Oh, if you liked Liquid Audio's DRM, don't fret. "In September, Liquid sold its digital encoding patents to Microsoft for $7 million." :?
One more thing. Those of you that have Liquid Audio tracks on your PC. What do you do now? As long as you keep your existing PC and operating system, you are OK. Get a new PC or upgrade to a new OS that the Liquid Audio player is not compatible with, I guess you lose your music. This is another reason that I won't bother with any solution that requires a proprietary player. Certainly not that Sony garbage. Not that I think Sony is going under anytime soon, but they will eventually drop support for Label Gate in favor of something else and your music will again be gone.
