It might be too much to hope that 2007 will see the demise of DRM, but it’s heartening to know that the record companies may at least be considering relaxing Digital Rights Management. Reuters has a round-up of five online vendors who are hoping to offer (or in some case, expand their current offering) DRM-free tunes in the coming year.
The list is an interesting mix of vendors, each entering the market from seemingly different vectors. We’ve got the longtime MP3 downloading service in eMusic; Yahoo! Music, which has toyed with DRM-free music; P2P service Limewire; social networking site MySpace; and Godzilla online retailer Amazon.
As I said in the lengthy missive I posted last month, I don’t think that offering unprotected tracks is going to be the disaster that the hidebound record company execs think it will be. After all, they’re already selling DRM-free music in the form of CDs, as they have been for the last twenty odd years. And while online music sales have been doing much better than the comparative sales of online movies, some people who were turned off by paying $15 for a product that they could get in higher quality with more features elsewhere are finding the same true for music.
The online music market needs to shift to selling based on its content and functionality, not on restriction and lock-in. The strength of digital downloads compared to the physical medium is in what can be done with them—not what can’t be done. Ditching DRM is the first step in that process; it’ll lead to increased competition between vendors and, in this sphere, that’s A Good Thing™.
I don't know. Do they have much choice? Would they be doing this if MS hadn't basically dumped PlaysForSure (aka Plays For Maybe, Pays For Sure)? Maybe now they've got no other way to try and differentiate themselves? It seems a bit like a restaurant going buffet when their business turns south. I don't know, maybe most of these five mentioned weren't doing PFS based downloads in the first place?
You, sir, are precisely right. And hopefully, the haze of confusion previously blindly record company guys to this same reality is starting to clear a bit. Online song buyers pay for convenience, reliable encoding, full information about the music, full ID3 tags, and the comfort of a habitual download approach that just always works. None of these atttributes have a thing to do with DRM, other then DRM reducing the 'convenience' and 'reliability' factors. So, eliminate DRM, and online sales will actually increase... I think dramatically.