While reading over the latest round of bickering about Apple's monopoly on digital music sales, it occurred to me that very few of the people doing the complaining are going to the trouble of setting a good example.

Now I'll admit that despite my ongoing frustrations with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store (and irrespective of my lust for their hardware!) I still have a lot of respect for Apple when it comes to the ongoing political issues in the music business. Their hard and fast stance with regard to iTunes pricing combined with their stubborn refusal to support competitors' media formats on the iPod singlehandedly saved listeners from a disastrously incoherent market in which DRM would undoubtedly have been used to manipulate them into repeatedly purchasing the same songs. Steve Jobs even ditched his own DRM as soon as the copyright holders allowed it. Pretty much solely because of Apple, you can now buy music that won't stab you in the back from the likes of Amazon, and it's no longer unreasonable for smaller DRM-free stores like us to reach for big-fish artists and labels as clients.

Summarizing and analyzing the past five years of iTunes politics could take up several posts, though, and it isn't really the point at the moment anyway. There's now an antitrust lawsuit of some sort over Apple's refusal to support the WMA audio format that was favored by the competing online music stores which used DRM. (Until they all tanked, at least -- remember Coca-Cola's music store? Exactly.)

The stance adopted by a lot of the kind-of-major-but-not-as-important-as-Apple players in the digital music game is, of course, that closing out competing media formats is anti-competitive. And they're right, to a certain degree -- after all, the iPods could very easily support more audio formats than they currently do, and Apple's deliberate attempts to prevent that can't possibly be construed as good for the consumer.

If that seems to contradict the preceding adulation, remember that we're talking about audio formats here, not DRM formats. I see no problem with the iPod supporting WMA, and it's only the acceptance of competing DRM schemes that would have landed consumers in trouble. And we won't even get into the irony of trying to break up the Apple monopoly by forcing them to implement the DRM scheme of a convicted monopolist.

So here we have all these hardware and media companies complaining about not being able to sell DRM protected music, but somehow nobody has yet called them out over the fact that they're not doing it themselves.

You'd think that in order to make a compelling case in front of a judge -- or in the public eye, which is ultimately the most important judge of all -- they'd offer up feature-laden hardware with support for every media format on the planet in order to contrast their strategy with Apple's artificial limitations.

Those guys are out there, but the point is not whether Cowon or the late iRiver made for more capable nerd trinketry. The problem is that powerful devices like that are not the expected standard among the iPod competitors. Where's the RealAudio support? Amazon only sells MP3, even though it's been years since Allofmp3 demonstrated that it's entirely feasible to run a multi-format download store with operating costs of merely pennies per track. And, of course, the Microsoft Zune still can't play Ogg Vorbis even though it is an awesome, totally open, and 100% patent-free format.

These are niche media formats with small user bases, for sure, but supporting any of them is trivial. If Apple's opponents really want an open marketplace, they owe it to us to make it truly free -- sell media files in many formats simultaneously, and make sure hardware support for those formats makes it to market more often than not. Then just let me pick what's right for my needs and get the hell out of the way. For the most part, they're all just trying to leverage their chosen form of lock-in, which smacks of "do as I say, not as I do."

In other words -- guys, if you want broad format support, do it yourself before filing your lawsuits!

This is particularly aggravating for an audio encoding geek such as myself, because I'm not happy with the encoding options as implemented by either Apple or Amazon. Sorry, guys, but judging from the services you're providing, I've concluded I can configure an encoder better than anybody on your staff. (I should point out, though, that eMusic comes pretty close to getting it right.) That, too, is probably a post for another day, but at least our customers are getting the benefit of my pent up frustration when they buy the kick-ass audio files we've loaded into the Monkeyclaus download store.

While Monkeyclaus doesn't yet have extensive built-in support for the niche formats, that issue is indeed on the development roadmap. In the meantime, we do sell FLAC, from which any format under the sun can be generated with a mere right-click using tools like Foobar and dBpowerAmp. Neither Rhapsody nor Napster nor any of the other also-ran download stores do that.

Don't get me wrong, though, this frustration is not limited to them. Even though I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to iTunes, when wishing upon stars and birthday candles and such I still inevitably hope for FLAC support in Quicktime. Keep your fingers crossed.

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