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Labels Push for a Unified DRM Standard
thejoelpatrol writes "Bad news for Apple fanatics but good news for all the crazy slashdotters who want an iPod but feel dirty using Apple's DRM: the labels are getting together and insisting that online stores standardize their DRM methods. Being the providers of the music, the labels clearly wield a lot of power, but so does Apple: without iTunes, the online music business is next to nothing. Will Apple give in? Not if they can help it -- they're on top of the world. Before anyone messes it up, AAC is an open format, while the Fairplay DRM standard is not."
Even though I do understand that content creators wish to protect themselves I believe that no DRM is the way to go.
The main thing is to focus on having a well working and simple delivery model, and to make sure the content isn't over-priced. DRM ultimately pretty useless, since it can always be broken eventually. If it's simpler to buy the content from a reputable store than getting it over P2P the model will work.
Tim O'Reilly wrote and excellent piece on the subject in 2002, and it still applies today: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
PS. I'm sure a lot of you will disagree, but at least I can claim to be a content creator myself...
.: Max Romantschuk
Not at all. Do you honestly believe that the labels are doing this for your (the customer's) good, to enable you to choose the mediaplayer and format you want? Then you're truly naive. Labels are greedy, greedy and greedy, in that order. The only reason that they are banding together on DRM now is that they are afraid that they will lose control (=revenue) over their digital music offerings to Apple, Microsoft or some other digital content provider. Which would serve them right.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
"While Apple has been widely praised for bringing online music into the mainstream market, some labels have complained it has priced tracks too low, making it difficult for them to make a profit from them."
But they are making a profit. My question is, how much? Just once, I wish I could see a quote like this backed-up by a statistic (one that makes sense, mind you).
One thing is clear, because Apple's iTunes Music Store has been successful, Apple has a great deal of clout during negotiations. If the music industry can make on line music a commodity with uniform standards, the music industry would be back in complete control.
Already, the music industry is getting full of itself with the success of iTMS. $.99 per track is no longer enough money for them. Rather than looking at the success of $.99 tracks, the music industry sees the success as a chance to raise prices, but Apple managed to stave them off. They don't want that to happen again.
Record labels have nothing to lose here. Revenues they get from Apple are laughable.
Apple, however, can't:
1. Make tracks more expensive - nobody's gonna buy them
2. Share the DRM format - bye bye iTunes revnues
3. Implement stronger DRM - nobody will buy tracks
4. Tell the record labels to fuck off - where are they gonna get the music then?
I think they're royally fucked.
what it will take for all of this to get resolved will be something similar to what Peter Gabriel is trying to develop. Perhaps a union of sorts to bring the labels to their knees. For the most part, other than distribution and PR the labels aren't needed for anything. If musicians learned to think and operate for themselves, this might be a moot point.
A wonderful example is Ani DiFranco. Whether you like her music is irrelevent. She's 100% self promoted, from albums to concerts. It's her production and her money and it's worked out very well.
I'm just waiting for an established giant to buck the system. When U2 or Aerosmith abandons their label and promotes their upcoming release via online distribution only (George Michael is doing this) the others will follow suit. Just hire a PR agency and collect a check, only a much larger one.
Peace
.at least that is the impression I get from reading your replies.
For example, I bought Deep Purple on vynil, several times cos they got fucked at parties, then I bought it several times on cassette, cos the tapes got chewed, then I bought it on an indestructible cd, and it died, then mp3 came along.
The music industry have NEVER EVER EVER been about selling music.
What they have ALWAYS sold and we have ALWAYS bought was the MEDIUM, eg vinyl, cassette, cd red book, whatever.
In the new digital age there is essentially no medium, only the data itself.
DRM in ALL ITS FORMS is quite simply nothing other than a DESPERATE (for failure = bankruptcy) attempt by these companies to impose pseudo medium characteristics onto medium free digital data.
I don't know why nobody gets this.
It's not just the RIAA, it is all big media business, hollywood as well as music biz as well as publishers as well as anyone who'se stuff can be distributed as digital data.
Talk of this version of drm vs that version of encoding versus this methods of copyright protection is all bullshit, because it is missing the point.
NOTHING LESS than imposing pseudo physical properties (the scratched vinyl, the chewed cassette, the skipped cd) onto digital media will satisfy these bastards.
Because anything less means their revenue stream crashes, permanently.
Wake up, this is essentially an American Big Media Corporation tea party vs the rest of the world and its consumers, you cannot afford to give these bastards even a nanometer.
America will end up as a digital cultural backwater, with everything inside its borders DRM'ed up the wazoo, and everyone outside the borders sticking 2 fingers up.
And this shit less than 24 hours after a post about the BBC (or rather hackers at the beeb before their bosses get tech savvy and twig) pushing for a open source codec in the community which by definition is not going to meet the needs of those who seek to make a fat living selling copy after copy after copy of the same thing to you, claiming to be selling you the media, but in fact merely peddling the medium itself.
wake up FFS
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Open as in "well-documented".
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Wow, where are my hip waders? A friend of mine is VP of artist development at a record label. He seemed to feel that if they could sell CD's for five dollars each without producing the CD media, in his words, "We'd be rolling in money."
Using 12 tracks as an average for most CD's at a dollar a track makes it already hugely profitable for record companies and the first thing they want to do is try to squeeze you for even more. Okay, figure most people don't download whole CD's, they buy single tracks. They're still making a ton of money.
Amazing that it never seems to be enough for them. Then to come out and lie about their profit margin so brazenly just astounds me.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
>> Bad news for Apple fanatics but good news for all the crazy slashdotters who want an iPod but feel dirty using Apple's DRM: the labels are getting together and insisting that online stores standardize their DRM methods.
/K
Um, how is this good news? Apple's DRM is actually fairly innocuous in practice. I don't feel the least bit dirty using it. Do you honestly believe that something foisted on us by the labels will be more end-user friendly and less proprietary?
Personally, I think we should get away from actually believing that a college student in Finland sat down and wrote an operating system.
A programmer from IBM passed the confidential trade-secret information for emulating UNIX to "Linux Tovald" who uploaded the program to an FTP site.
If you think a college student could just sit down and emulate an industry standard operating system, then you should go work for The O'Reilly Factor and not spend so much time trolling, troll.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.