Digital downloads die just like you and I

As I scratched the security seal off the back of my $25 iTunes gift card and prepared to go on a music downloading spree, I suddenly put the card down and started to reconsider.

I thought to myself, “In 10 years, will the songs I buy today work on any device and on any computer?” I looked over to my stack of ancient CDs and realized that they still worked 10 years later. But what about digital music? What are we getting ourselves into with digital downloads?

There is, after all, no guarantee that an iTunes song, or an M4A file, will be supported by Apple’s future versions of iTunes in 10 years. In fact, the M4A is dying by the day as three of the “Big Four” record labels have started to convert their collections on iTunes to be copy protection free. And the fourth major label is on the verge of announcing the same.

So what am I to do with the songs I’ve purchased on iTunes for years that have copy protection and are sure to not work in iTunes in a few years? Apple suggests upgrading the songs to “iTunes Plus” (or the format without copy protection that costs the same as songs with copy protection). Well, I’d love to rid my songs of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and finally be able to use them on any device, but it costs 30 cents for each song to do this. I have to pay $30 to ensure my old music can live on?

The other option is to burn them all to CDs and store them with the other artifacts I have lying in boxes, but isn’t the point of a digital download to develop a digital library of songs that hides within a small hard drive? Apple, I ditched CDs for your iPod hardware that one day won’t know what an M4A is.

I’ve purchased videos, music, computer games, books and more, all through digital download software or services like iTunes, Amazon, BitTorrent (yes, they are legal, too) and the increasingly popular Zinio (magazine reader). While these services make life so much easier by bringing content directly into the living room with the click of a mouse, I can’t help but fear how long my digital property will last.

Operating systems change, programs become incompatible and file types as common as .doc even begin fading away (if you haven’t met its predecessor .docx yet, try not and scream too loud when you do). Microsoft is a classic example of making old programs incompatible overnight with its latest operating system, Windows Vista.

For some reason as bizarre as how we think that illegal downloading is normal, we seem to believe that when we purchase digital downloads, we own something. But do we really? Can you own data?

We never say, “I bought a bunch of 1s and 0s last night. They sound great!” We say, “I bought a song.” That song, however, is only alive so long as the hard drive in your computer works. Once your hard drive dies (which they do every few years without warning), your lovely “song” disappears and it’s gone forever.

As we enter what Bill Gates has declared the “second digital decade,” we need to be more aware of what we are purchasing online. As we continue to rely on getting movies, music and software through digital download services because of its convenience, we need to remember they have no physical presence and require backups (if you haven’t invested in an external hard drive, start considering it soon).

And most importantly, should we one day choose to move entirely away from a physical market and into an all-digital market, are we threatening the lifespan of today’s creative work for historians several centuries from now? I can only hope that a historian from 2689 can watch “Star Wars” on a dusty DVD player dug up in my backyard.

And as for my iTunes gift card, I think I’ll wait until all of the major record labels have officially let go of copy protection before I invest in some soon-to-be-incompatible music.