Last week, I said that the big reason why XM Satellite Radio pulled the XM PCR PC-based radio off the market was that the added feature of MP3-conversion was a political liability in their larger fight against music royalties. Matt Haughey wrote an article for PVRblog that looks at the situation from the user’s perspective and makes equally correct points about the arbitrary nature of the situation.
Haughey says:
They claim piracy, but if someone’s paying $10 a month just to save a few MP3s, I seriously doubt they are redistributing it to thousands of folks that would otherwise be XM customers…. XM shouldn’t be pulling devices off the market that get them new subscribers…, they should have bought the TimeTrax product and incorporated it into their PC control software….
I think he’s absolutely right, but XM has bigger fish to fry. Long-term survival for them and for Sirius may depend upon getting on an equal footing with traditional radio from a music-licenseing perspective. As long as the road to viability goes over Capitol Hill, I expect a strict approach to intellectual-property control issues.