MP3 Going the Way of the 8-Track?
joepa writes "According to this MSN/ZDNet story, MP3 is dying. Overall, the data has not shown a clear trend, but at least one recent study reports that people are deleting MP3s faster than they are downloading them. AAC and WMA, meanwhile, are apparently gaining market share. Is this evidence that MP3 is being used largely to sample music rather than for permanent archival and listening purposes? They still don't think so. "
People just realize that when they need disk space, it's easier to delete mp3s because they can get them again anytime they want freely. The same can't be said for most WMA and AAC files which cost money. Once they're gone, you probably have to pay again. I know I didn't archive my music collection in mp3, though. I chose Ogg Vorbis, and may people choose something like FLAC.
What about OGG?
"Is this evidence that MP3 is being used largely to sample music rather than for permanent archival and listening purposes?"
Is this statement evidence that someone's trying to justify illegal activity? Maybe you should try the ol' trusty "Your honor, she was asking for it! You should have seen the way that MP3 was dressed."
AAC and WMA are on the rise, and that makes sense given the current marketing trends with these two codecs. Does that mean mp3 is dying? Hardly. It will be around for quite sometime, despite development of superior codecs.
all the companies producing new mp3 players agree...
[/sarcasm]
So, most of what we download is crap. What's new here?
See what I've been reading.
Has netcraft confirmed it?
I think this should be obvious, given the rise of "legitimate" music sites like iTunes none too eager to use MP3 as their format of choice. But MP3 will always be around, given the thousands of people out there who have vast hoards of MP3 collections from the heady days of Napster 1.0.
MP3 is not going to vanish any time soon it is cross platform, there are many aplications writen for it. I think that some time in to the near future we will see an update to this standart.
He's going to download what is readily available, or use the default format of the most readily available CD ripper. Winamp will play them all regardless; you can't even tell the difference.
Could it just be that a lot of people who were prolific in downloading mp3's now have most of the songs they want? I personally don't care about most new music enough to buy a cd or download a track, not that there isn't some good music out there, I just don't feel theres much I'm willing to pay for. And most of the older stuff I'm into I either got in napsters hey-day, or I own on CD, I can't recall the last time I actively seeked a song out. That and as other posters have already said, the mp3 audiophiles and already moved onto ogg and other formats.
Just more FUD.
Study sponsored by Microsoft with their own DRM agenda to push I presume...
The only thing I'd delete my MP3s for, are OGGs.
Suck it down you hapless technoweenies, Give me DRM-Free or give me death!
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
MSN is reporting the death of a rival format of WMA? Wow, there's a shocker!
Remember when Fraunhofer threatened companies for infringing on certain MP3 license a few years ago? Well, that shook the industry into finding alternate solutions. For me, if it isn't some form of lossless open standard such as Flac than I prefer to pass not only on the sound track but the playing device as well. For me, listening to highly compressed MP3 isn't my cup of tea even if the compression ratio for lossy is higher than lossless.
I am glade that Wikipedia settled (?) on OGGs rather than MP3s due to the open nature of the format. Hopefully this trend will continue whereby patent encumbrance may not be best solutions.
http://reilly.typepad.com/cameronreilly/2004/09/aa c_vs_wma_vs_m.html
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
Could it be that the people who are running the spyware for this data to be mined for the research are more prone to losing their P2Ped mp3s when the 128 kilibyte .exe they downloaded thinking it was some game nuked their drive.? :)
I guess I'll have to stop playing mp3s on by BSD boxen..
I frankly don't see mp3 going anywhere in the near future. It's ubiquitous, open, and of high quality. Despite what many "audiophiles" will say to the contrary, a 224 capped VBR0 mp3 will not be perceptibly different from even a the most perfect "lossless" method for 99% of music.
My 486 can play mp3s. My crappy DVD player can play mp3s. My old-as-hell CD-based mp3 player can play mp3s.
Sure, someday there will be a switch. Maybe for multi-channel audio, maybe for special neural orgasm stimulation, maybe for quantum compression. But for the time being, no file format exists that has enough of a net benefit over mp3 to warrent a mass-exodus.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I prefer my music to have that scratchy tin can sound of my youthful use of a pocket transistor radio tuned to the AM band. So of course my collection is all in Real Audio format. Takes less space, sounds awful, and with Real Alternative I can listen without the adware. Yeah I know, all the other formats: pure pristine sound. Well my other record player is a 78 Victrola....
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
In politics, you proclaim as already true what you would like to happen eventually.
i can't remember the extesion but the ipod format should be the only format making in-roads against the mp3 format.
most new electronic devices play the mp3 format but ignore the acc, ogg, wma, etc formats, like dvd players, car stereos, and the like.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Doesnt mean mp3 is dying. There are so many bad mp3 files (due to bad nameing, RIAA subversion, etc) and just so much lousy music that most of the mp3s on P2P are not worth saveing.
Also think about how many times you say "I want song x", and then your search on p2p turns up 40 different versions, thirty of which are covers by some irish tenor?
They probably are missing its increased utility, in swapping amongst friends. Whenever I am at a friends house, I rip all of their cds to mp3s, and most of the people I know do the same. This kind of use with the increasing prevelance of iPods and other players is definitely on the rise.
that is why mp3 players are not selling.
Oh and I see lots of home stereo players that will play DRM'd music... My audiotron will play WMA's until you get to the DRM variety.
mp3 is as popular as ever, hell the new phone system here uses mp3 exclusively for voice messages, background music and voice prompts.
Oh and when was the last time you saw a car stereo that would play any DRM'd music??
mp3 is solid as a format.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...because I just moved my 80+ GB collection to a bigger drive and cleaned off the old one.
Gotta have room for all the new quality music comming out of the music industry, you know.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
But just because many MP3s on P2P simply don't cut it (too low bitrate/pieces missing/fakes/etc.)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
On the rare (RARE!) occasion that I buy one. Why? Because I can actually play them. See, WMA, AAC, OGG or the codec-of-the-week might be superior to MP3 but everything that plays compressed digital audio plays MP3. It's an issue of what will play where. When everything I have plays OGG, I'll probably switch to that. It'll probably be a long while before I replace my DVD player with one with OGG support though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as I dislike starting an argument with a logical fallacy, you should really look at the article a bit before making any claims as to the death of MP3.
First of all the article page loads with the title "MSN Tech & Gadgets". This is noteworthy, especially seeing as how MS is trying to break into this market. Of course they'd say MP3 is dead, especially when they're touting a DRM enabled propriatary format.
Also, we have this gem from the article:
According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.
Aside from this being really creepy, it's a biased sample. Anyone who would let someone put monitoring software on their PC (assuming it's not spyware) would probably not have a lot of MP3 files on their machine, if you know what I mean *nudge nudge*.
To sum up: Article is bogus advertising spin. Nothing to see here, move along.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: MP3 is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MP3 community when IDC confirmed that MP3 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music files. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MP3 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MP3 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive audio test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MP3's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MP3 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MP3 because MP3 is dying. Things are looking very bad for MP3. As many of us are already aware, MP3 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Open source MP3 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time MP3 developers Frauhofer and Philips only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: MP3 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Frauhofer and Philips, abysmal sales and so on, Philips went out of business and was taken over by Magnavox who sell another troubled audio system. Now MP3 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that MP3 has steadily declined in market share. MP3 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If MP3 is to survive at all it will be among audio dilettante dabblers. MP3 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, MP3 is dead.
Fact: MP3 is dying
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
8-track? I think vinyl would have been a better analogy. Mp3s will never go completely away since they still have, and will still have, some use. But 8-tracks were an actual offense to music (yes, I'm that old). I don't remember any other format that violently cut a song in half so that the friggin thing could switch to side two. Once casette tapes came out, 8-tracks were dumped hard by everybody. By contrast, while vinyl majorly died off, it still holds a nostalgic quality and has its niche purposes among enthusiasts who just can't give up THE sound a vinyl album produces (I prefer "The Wall" on vinyl -- it's hard to stop thinking of it as four sides to two vinyl disks).
The days of the 8-track is like a bad memory to me....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Just as my copy of Open Office still reads DOS format text files just fine, my hardware solid state music player that I buy in 2050 will still play MP3. Unlike 8-track and Beta (hardware formats), there's no barrier to force old software formats out of the market.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Thanks to assholes out there (RIAA, dumbasses, etc)... you have to download 10 copies of a song just to find one that isn't cut, low quality, a different song mislabeled, the chorus looped over and over, or simply static.
no comment
Thankfully (for MP3 fans) this is a software technology. Even if MP3s lose market share and are not available from subscription services like e-music or the late mp3.com the technology will still always be there.
Not much different than an Atari 2600 emulator.
And certainly the format will continue to get support from most major software and hardware manufacturers. I doubt the day is on us when we can by a WMA head unit for the auto that doesn't support MP3.
For God's sake there is a C=64 web browser. What's the chances that MP3 is going away?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
With 8 track, the tapes only worked with 8 track players.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Have you ever noticed how almost every small storage technology uses the horribly limited, slow, badly designed FAT filesystem? There is a reason for this: FAT is the most compatable FS available. Few people use it anymore on their main filesystem (because it sucks), but almost everything else seems to use it.
I see the same thing happening with MP3. People just digitizing their music so they don't have to pull out CDs all the time will use whatever has the best sound/size tradeoff (or whatever comes with the system). If they're encoding their music for use on joe random device, they'll use MP3.
I read the internet for the articles.
You mean I'm going to have to deal with my dad constantly shifting his boxes of 8-Tracks AND MP3s around the attic and complaining about not 'being able to find a decent player anymore'?
Informatus Technologicus
Heck no, they will use this as proof that all of their laws and tactics are working. Now, all they need to do is get copyright extended again to infinity-1 years, pass a much stronger version of the DMCA, get that INDUCE act passed and the world will be right.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
First off, as digital music becomes the norm which it practically is, people are becoming more savvy to it. With tapes, vinyl or 8-tracks, there was one quality essentially and thats it. But when you get into encoding its a whole new ballgame. There have been many comparisons of the current big formats. In the end, unless you listen ONLY to simple electronic music (dance) and encode at very high rates, mp3 is pretty crappy at replicating the source. Most tests show WMA as the best, which i personally find hard to believe, with aac and ogg performing in the middle neither having any strong advantage over the other unless you consider specific music types.
But the strength of mp3 lies in its accessibility, space impact, and reach by having existed for so long. I dont see a reason to replace mp3, and i doubt it will, but i wouldnt rely on it for EVERYTHING.
At the end of the day, mp3 wont be the one and only thing, doesnt mean its dying, it means there are more options. Not need for the doom and gloom on mp3. You can just say, its not the 100 lb. gorrilla it once was.
...and it should be known by now
...I use Ogg Vorbis and it works just fine. All my music is in one place and, it's all legal (ripped from CDs I purchased) and I can listen to it anywhere thanks to icecast+OpenVPN. Power to the people baby! ;)
Un-news
...it's probably because that's what iTunes and WMP, respectively, rip to by default.
I don't care how common WMA is, or that AAC is technically a "standard." MP3 is the only thing I know of that will play on every device and every computer, period. Hell, I bought a $79 AIWA deck for my car and it'll play MP3s from a CD. But not WMA, AAC, or anything else.
MP3 will die--right after Apple & BSD.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The manufactures are still marketing the products as "mp3" Players even though they have support for different formats. So people might buy things like the rio karma and the dell jukebox because they are "mp3" Players, odds are they'll end up putting wma's on them. As the story says, many people don't know the difference and don't really care that much.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Ogg is fine, I have no tchnical quarrels with it, and as a free codec, I think its fabulous.
however, if I decided not to use ogg, WMA would be about the last choice. Think about it:
1) WMA is not playable in an iPod and is difficult on non-windows platforms
2) WMP10 plays and RIPs MP3
3) MP3 is probably the best choice for people who need to move it amongst platforms.
4) unemcumbered AAC's are the best choice for people who own an iPod.
5) If you really care about the music and dont' want to be a slave to the flavor of the month, choose flac or ape.
6) WMA's are probably the last choice you'd make. No, check that. ATRAC is the last choice. But WMA's are close.
Seriously, you can rip in MP3. Make it your default in WMP10. Better yet, use your brain and use the FREE version of WinAmp 5.x. Better quality, no lock-in.
Well my other record player is a 78 Victrola....
You kids these days with your 'records.' Wax cylinders were good enough for me when I was your age, and they're good enough for me now.
By the way, your sig is the cat's meow.
KFG
This trend is very alarming. It basically proves what I should have known all along: the technical merits of a format, along with how laden it is with DRM, do not matter at all to the general public.
I thought that Xiph was doing a great thing with Ogg and I moved my entire collection over to ogg vorbis. I love it, and it sounds good. I thought it was a matter of time for the move from MP3 to Ogg to happen, since MP3 is larger, has more audio quality issues, and is not "free". Boy was I wrong! I thought people would be moving over to the smaller, higher quaity, free-as-in-speech codec.
Instead, we're seeing the opposite! People moving to more restrictive codecs (although the quality may still be better). I knew most people didn't care about free-as-in-speech that much, but this is sort of alarming...
Those people claim that the sounds CD's and mp3's cut are still part of the overall experience and their absence can be heard.
Are they right? Wtf do I know, I can't tastes brands of coffee but don't doubt coffee tasters. After a few glasses I can't even tell if I am drinking whiskey let alone wich blend but I don't doubt the experts. I can't tell colors apart but am smarter then to argue with a girl about it.
The simple fact is that humans have different ears. Just as some people can see the flicker of those tube lights and others of crt monitors some people have a lot better hearing. I just find flac amusing since it is used to rip cd's. Whats the fucking point? CD's are already leaving sound out. If you want to rip the real sound you gotta at least start at LP's.
So yes flac is kinda pointless, real audiophiles don't want it because it is still only cd's and people with mp3 players don't have the space or hardware.
But don't discount the difference in sound just because you don't hear it. Others may have better hearing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
MP3 is piracy, piracy is wrong. If you pirate music, you are a criminal and belong behind bars.
Now, see, that's what I love about Slashdot: the finely nuanced and rational discourse. It's good to know that we provide a forum for debate in which Tucker Carlson would feel right at home.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Of course you could also go and buy it legitimately and avoid that headache.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"According to this MSN/ZDNet story, JPG is dying. Overall, the data has not shown a clear trend, but at least one recent study reports that people are deleting JPG'S faster than they are downloading them. GIF and BMP, meanwhile, are apparently gaining market share. Is this evidence that JPG is being used largely to sample pictures rather than for permanent archival and viewing purposes? They still don't think so. " Only time will tell...only time will tell.
So lemme get this straight, the maker of WMA (MS) issues a report that MP3 is dying, to be replaced with (among others) WMA? Big shock.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Dear MP3... Even though experts have decreed that you will soon be replaced by a new and better way of doing things, I wouldn't worry. Signed, IPv4 Coca-Cola Classic
iTunes, by default, rips CDs to AAC files. Windows Media play rips CDs to WMA. Most users do not change their default settings, and so any CD ripped with their primary listening software will be stored in the corresponding format.
I use iTunes and I changed the settings to rip to variable bit rate MP3. But I'm a power user, and I imagine that most users don't even know what variable bit rate means.
A hungry man will tell you anything if you give him a cookie.
Why is mp3 going the way of the 8-track? Why do people want to start putting mp3's on 8-track now? That erases any portability gains. Also, 8-track sucks. In case people don't know, 8-track is so old (like 1960's and 70's) it's not even funny. Now I am gonna have to shop around at flea markets for an 8-track player just so I can enjoy my myraid of MP3's. Those things suck up battery life like no-one's business too. Well I hope I can get one of those GROOVY models that have built-in speakers that split the one speaker apart so you can have better stereo. Ooh! I want one with additional speaker jacks so I can have QUADRAPHONIC sound. That would be totally kicky-blast and wailin'.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
Seriously, did they break into people's computers and do searches? Did they use P2P searches (which are about as reliable as a slashdot poll)? Did they run around a small part of the US looking for information? No, the story says "analysts" and "researchers", without naming names as far as I read.
You know what this is? This is akin to the old conspiracy theorist FUD model of writing, with a journalistic twist. The conspiracy theorist fud model simply states that you state the problem, in as worrying as words possible, every 2 or so sentances inbetween prooving it. For example:
"Researchers at NY university said that an asteroid is going to hit the earth within 2/3 months. This asteroid will wipe out ALL of the life on the planet. It is the size of texas."
Ect, ect ect and so on. Journalists write it in a journalistic way, however, instead of having the FUD every 2-3 sentances, they restate their thesis in a different way, then proceed to use words such as "researchers" or "analysts" over and over to somehow give it credibility. So, how did they get the information?
The "analysts and researchers" are "NPD group". They have a spyware app called "music watch digital", you know, the one that is put onto EMI's CD's and loaded onto the machine via autorun. You know, the one that can be disabled by the shift key? Yea, that one, the one that catalouges a persons harddisk and sends it back to whoever.
Now, the next question is, why would ZD net have a MS sponsored article written by a CNET staff member? Oh, wait, there's a second article at the bottom of the page, talking about a "maturing" mp3 market. You know, the market that is now going towards paying for DRM'd disabled music online? Notice the mention of sony, apple, and MS's players which will undoubtedly go towards people looking into these players and music services?
This equates to "our spyware app says that the mp3 may be dieing. People are using these players". Must be a slow news day or somethin'.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Comment removed based on user account deletion
An playing LPs in your car was always easy.
No wonder they still selling millions of albums on "vynl"
As a DJ I've bought and still buy a significant number of vinyl records, and in fact probably own more LPs than CDs. I love my 1200s and crates of records, but I still wish vinyl sounded as good as CDs and didn't require maintenance. My shoulders, back, and arms also wish the 12 inch records could magically go on a diet and trim down to CD sexiness.
Sure, there are some aesthetic listening qualities to playing stuff on vinyl. Some people like the slight static/crackle sounds and the other random artifacts that they'll call enhancements. After spending way too much time previewing records in reference headphones for years I think I could do without such artifacts.
That said, whenever I'm playing out at parties or a club I've noticed that no one wants to see someone spin CDs. There's some aesthetic aspect of nightlife that makes people think that 12 inch rotating dics look cool. And somehow spinning vinyl appears to be an artform, whereas using CDs is relegated to the respectfulness of queuing up something in winamp. Oh well.
Aside being an iPod owner myself, I like AAC for a variety of reasons :
1) it's ISO-standardized
2) it's the default codec for MPEG4
3) it's embraced by Apple and iTunes Music Store
4) it's sound beats mp3 by far
5) it's sound (at 128/192), in my opinion, is slightly superior to WMA
6) by not using WMA, i'm not tied to Microsoft's future changes in licensing agreements
currently i have mp3's by far, but I rip all new CDs to AAC (m4a, not m4p).
Ogg Vorbis is unsupported by most mainstream hardware, and WMA excels only in low bit rates of =64, which I don't rip to. MP3Pro is barely embraced, and mp3's psychoacoustic model is aging, thus leaving AAC good for quite some time to come (at least until the replacement of AAC arrives).
Surprisingly, while MPEG4's AAC is widely adopted and available, few people have access to MPEG2's AC3 (possibly due to licensing issues with Dolby). Sony's ATRAC3+ is so proprietary it's not even funny.
Music gets boring fast. People aren't hoarding it any more.
Its not something you put on the shelf.
Some say, its something you 'make for yourself', and thats the true spirit of music.. not the mighty buck...
Sure, there are always classics, but generally, stuff gets old fast. Who cares about keeping it around any more?
There's tons of it, old and new, to be had.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've made copies of a couple CD's onto my hard drive (for backup of course) and the files got created with an MP4 extension. I've never heard of MP4 before. Is that just a mistake in the application (I believe it was Nero)? Or is MP4 a different format from MP3?
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
Try using www.mp3shield.com - works well and you at least you don't have to listen to the crap to get what you like - it'll tell you you've downloaded crap. I swear by it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I don't understand what the big deal is about formats. Here on /. I hear all the time about how great AAC or Ogg is, but to be honest I never have heard of them anywhere else. Now granted, I'm not am music buff. When I wanted to put the few CDs I own on my PC (to make them easier to listen to / organize, not to share) I went to WMP and looked, and here was this thing called WMA Lossless. Takes more space, but it mathematically lossless, so you have full CD quality at less than 1/2 of the space it would take for pure .wav files. So that is what I use, and if I want to listen to them on my MP3 player I just plug it in and it converst them to either 320kbs MP3 or 192kps WMA, whichever I feel like, and puts them on the player. Ta-da. No extra software, nothing. Works like a charm, and the lossless files on my hard drive are excellent. So what is it everybody has against WMA?....
William George
This is NOT about Google Desktop.
(1) Geeks know there are better codecs to rip to then MP3. (2) iTunes makes getting the song you want relatively cheap, so there's less of an excuse to use p2p, where most of the MP3s are. (2) "Average people" don't know about p2p and so they are getting their files from legal sources, sources which don't publish in MP3 because MP3 doesn't have DRM. It looks like the industry's quest to kill MP3 and get DRM into everything is finally starting to pay off. However, I predict the trend against MP3 will reverse when people finally discover just how restrictive DRM is. It hasn't happened yet, but once all CDs have copy-protection and it becomes a pain to do what you want to do with your music, the subject will get more and more attention.
Despite this, I note that the original story indicates that MP3 is still more popular than any DRM-locked format, and that purchased (proprietary DRM-locked) songs are a tiny percentage of what people have around.
What's interesting is they are talking about people's habits in deleting files (which means nothing). Of course, people are less likely to delete files they have paid for over MP3s of files they may have ripped from their own CDs or have downloaded off a file-sharing service. If you didn't pay anything for the copy and you get tired of it or don't like the song, you might (or are more likely to) delete it. You're less likely to do that (even if you don't like it) with a song you paid hard cash for the copy. Witness the number of people who throw away / donate / give away used paperbacks they paid under $1 (and especially 50c and below), versus people who keep brand-new paperbacks and don't toss their new ones away as quickly.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
While I can concieve of an increase of popularity with aac because of iTunes I'm a bit suspicious of the report because it specifically mentions DRM formats. My guess is Microsoft is just trying to push the lie that people want DRM.