I worked at AT&T in the late 1990s on an early music sales (not streaming) service called a2b Music. It sounds ridiculous now (why would AT&T think they could succeed in consumer-facing music sales!) but at the time they were a co-owner of the AAC patents and wanted to commercialize them. They also had lots of bandwidth and thought this made sense.
Being "responsible" folks (and also having no choice in the matter) AT&T bent over backward to accommodate the labels. Half the product was proprietary DRM that made everything constantly unusable. Despite this, the labels still strangled us by limiting what we could sell. Apple quite correctly ignored all of this and solved the problem by first launching the iPod, waiting until it had critical mass (much of which involved tons of unpaid MP3 downloading) and then launching the iTunes Store in 2003 when they had an installed base full of piracy - and the major labels had no choice but to join on their terms. (Obviously I pity the small labels who got screwed in the dynamic.)
I think about this a lot when people complain about cryptocurrency or Uber/Lyft evading regulations or destroying legacy businesses. Often this kind of behavior is bad, often the little guy gets crushed. But at the end of the day, legacy businesses really are poison and much of the awfulness could be avoided if they weren't trying to hold on to things so tightly.
> why would AT&T think they could succeed in consumer-facing music sales
Their customers already had the devices on them all the time for playing music, but it was still owned by AT&T (sim lock) and they had the paymen platform with the phone bill. Of course both wasn't really good and they tried to avoid any bigger investment, which made them lose. But still it kinda made sense from a buisness perspective.
Sony bought CBS records entirely because of how the disastrous the whole DAT rollout was because of the record companies fears of consumers being able to make digital recordings at home.
FairPlay DRM was an utter breath of fresh air compared to the DRM we were using at AT&T. There were other companies like InterTrust competing at the time to build incredibly-restrictive powerful DRM, and despite all this crazy work (many PhDs in cryptography!) the labels kept asking for more before they would begrudgingly put a few titles on sale. FairPlay DRM was "just good enough" to satisfy the DRM requirement while also being pretty easy to break, and it remained more or less regularly "broken" for many years. This didn't matter because it turned out that very few people pirated content by breaking the DRM (especially when you could just rip a CD yourself.) As you pointed out, Apple eventually got rid of it.
In my later security evaluation career I saw a similar dynamic play out for other DRM companies, and even saw how corrupt the industry was. If you knew the right people or had enough market power your DRM would be "good enough", and if not: tough luck. Technical evaluation didn't matter.
The DRM was totally reasonably. Even though it was hackable, you didn't really need to, at least in my use cases it was fine.
I contrast that with some phone I bought before that supported some number of songs (nightmare), with zune (nightmare). Apple picked a level of lockdown that I'd guess for 80% of users didn't interfere. That compares to the other foks dramatically.
and allowed you to stream your whole library to, well, pretty much anyone.
early iTunes was pretty slick, in my opinion. We had so many shares streaming in the office. people curated playlists and clicked that share button. loved it.
That's a weird takeaway. My takeaway is that content is king. Content has tilted our whole legal system to its advantage, and the transition to digital has made it worse. It is anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-innovation, anti-capitalist.
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I suspect you mean speed/bandwidth when you say scale, but that isn't the entirety of what scale means. try being in russia right now and buying products like netflix or similar sold in USD. With crypto you have free (as in freedom) money that enables consenting people to trade without the permission of oppressive governments.
As for bandwidth and speed there are _plenty_ of crypto solutions that match or beat SWIFT, which as of last year was probably peaking somewhere around 150k (very generous assumption based on 40 million messages a day) FIN messages a second. It takes many FIN messages to complete a transaction of exchanging money and there are numerous blockchains which do in excess of 50k tx/sec
Being "responsible" folks (and also having no choice in the matter) AT&T bent over backward to accommodate the labels. Half the product was proprietary DRM that made everything constantly unusable. Despite this, the labels still strangled us by limiting what we could sell. Apple quite correctly ignored all of this and solved the problem by first launching the iPod, waiting until it had critical mass (much of which involved tons of unpaid MP3 downloading) and then launching the iTunes Store in 2003 when they had an installed base full of piracy - and the major labels had no choice but to join on their terms. (Obviously I pity the small labels who got screwed in the dynamic.)
I think about this a lot when people complain about cryptocurrency or Uber/Lyft evading regulations or destroying legacy businesses. Often this kind of behavior is bad, often the little guy gets crushed. But at the end of the day, legacy businesses really are poison and much of the awfulness could be avoided if they weren't trying to hold on to things so tightly.