Part 3 of the Halstead York interview is up - history, economics, and DRM

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Aug 1st, 2007 @ 10:45 AM

The third and last part of my interview with Halstead York is now up.

It covers our days in the bleeding edge of CD-ROM multimedia, how the economics of production is opening up filmmaking to a whole new kind of carreer, and DRM.

One thing I should expand on a little more on a big reason why URGE is better than iTunes - subscriptions. With URGE, I can download or stream as much music as I want to for a single flat rate ($120/year). So instead of having to gamble on whether or not I want to risk buying a new CD, I can just grab whatever I'm mildly curious about, with no economic punishment for sampling something that's not to my taste. And really, is there any other way for a 36 year old father of three to get obsessed with cheeky brits like Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys? Or get reconnected with Nomeansno (URGE is playing me "Rag N' Bones" right no)?

The important point here is that this is a business model that would NOT work without DRM. If there wasn't DRM, I'd be looking at having to pay $1.29 per track for non-DRM'ed content, and only from a few providers. And with that, I'd simply wind up listening to lot less music I like, and probably paying more for it at the same time.

Anyway, Here's the interview.

And yes, we really paid more than $1000/GB for our first RAID. And $5000 for a capture card that only did S-Video and 8-bit audio.