[Solar-general] OT: La gran estafa digital

Vie Sep 14 06:13:06 CEST 2007

En ingles pero interesante, sobre el curro de los ringtones:

A Baffling New Phenomenon: Customized Ringtones
By DAVID POGUE

At last week's presentation for journalists in California,
Apple unveiled a refreshed iPod lineup and several
secondary developments. One of them, which I didn't have
room to cover in my iPod review today, involves the
availability of custom ringtones for the iPhone.

Ringtones, of course, are little 30-second snippets from pop
songs that play on your cellphone when somebody calls. It's
an insanely profitable industry--to the tune of $5 billion a
year, worldwide.

Apple's version works like this: you buy a song from Apple's
iTunes store for $1--a song that, in the latest version of
the iTunes software, bears the little ringtone icon (looks
like a bell).

(At the moment, they're far and few between. Apple says
about half a million of the store's 6 million songs are
available as ringtones; more will follow as Apple gets
permission from the record companies, one song at a time.
The eligible songs are indicated by a little bell icon in
the Ringtones column, which appears when you open the View
menu, choose View Options, and turn on the Ringtone
checkbox.)

Once you've downloaded the song to the iTunes program on
your Mac or PC, you click the little bell icon to open up a
very slick ringtone editor. Here, you can select a slice of
the song, between 3 and 30 seconds long, that you want to
be your ringtone. You can control whether it loops and
whether it fades in or out. Then you can buy the ringtone
for another $1 and transfer it to your iPhone.

O.K., this is all fine, and fun, and just what a lot of
people had been asking for. But I have some questions about
ringtones. Truth is, I'm a bit baffled by the whole
phenomenon. Maybe some articulate 14-year-old can answer
them for me.

Question 1: Apple is selling a ringtone and the full song
together for $2, and claims that that's a bargain.

As it turns out, that's correct--at least compared with
existing sources for ringtone sales. Pop song ringtones
from T-Mobile and Sprint cost $2.50 apiece; from Verizon,
$3. You don't get to customize them, choose the start and
end points, adjust the looping and so on. Incredibly, after
90 days, every Sprint ringtone dies, and you have to pay
another $2.50 if you want to keep it. Verizon's last only a
year.

Three bucks for a 30-second snippet that lasts a year--when
you can buy the entire song online for $1 and own it
forever?

What am I missing here? How is a 30-second, time-limited
excerpt worth three times as much as the full work forever?

Does this not enter the heads of the people who are paying
$5 billion a year?

Question 2: If I buy and download a pop song legitimately,
shouldn't I be able to trigger playback any way I want? Why
must I pay one fee to play it by tapping Play, and a second
fee to play it when someone calls my phone?

It just makes no sense.

Now, I realize that it's easy to get ringtones onto your
phone (or iPhone) for free, using unauthorized techniques
of varying degrees of difficulty. Thousands of people do
ringtones that way, but I'm not even going there.

And my intention isn't to shoot the messenger by blaming
Apple for the insanity of this pricing. Apple's pricing is
lower than any American carrier, offers customizability
that nobody else does, and gets you both the ringtone and
the full song.

No, I'm sure that, if you follow the ringtone gravy train to
its source, you'll find record-company executives. There
they'll be sitting, rubbing their hands together with glee
and hoping that their young customers don't identify the
ringtone industry for what it is: the last great digital
rip off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/technology/circuits/13pogue-email.html?8cir&emc=cir

-- 
Sebastián Bassi (セバスティアン). Diplomado en Ciencia y Tecnología.
Curso Biologia molecular para programadores: http://tinyurl.com/2vv8w6
GPG Fingerprint: 9470 0980 620D ABFC BE63 A4A4 A3DE C97D 8422 D43D