The soap opera that is the internet music industry has taken another Melrose Place-ish twist with the defection of AT&T’s a2b music team to a Redmond-backed rival. Co-founders of a2b, Larry Miller and Howie Singer, will now serve as president and senior vice president of Reciprocal Inc’s newly formed Reciprocal Music division. The New York Times reports that a dozen other members of the team will follow the pair to Reciprocal, out of a total team of 26. AT&T executives could be forgiven for wondering where they went wrong.
In their new roles, Miller and Singer will tackle the problems of digital rights management for the online music industry. Reciprocal insists that means more than just a copyright- protected alternative to the wildly popular internet audio compression format MP3. Based on Microsoft Corp’s Windows Media Rights Manager, the company’s software lets content owners establish terms and conditions for consumption of all kinds of content, from text to video to – well, audio.
As the recording industry and its lackeys try to close down access to musical content on the net, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has challenged them to embrace openness. In a platform statement released on Monday May 17, the San Francisco- based non-profit called on record labels and distribution rights management vendors like Reciprocal to create a standard digital music technology that is open to consumers, manufacturers and artists. What the EFF does not explicitly say is that this technology already exists. It’s called MP3.
