Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo! Sells, Advocates DRM-Free Music
prostoalex writes "Jessica Simpson's 'A Public Affair' will be sold on Yahoo! Music in MP3 format with no DRM attached. According to Yahoo! Music blog, this is a big deal for the major online music store: 'As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!'"
Pity they didn't choose an artist I would actually want to listen to.
Companies talk of thinking different, while others actually perform different. Tip of the hat to yahoo who may strangely become relevant again.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Is the music industry starting to see sense?
/. pessimist and go searching for the loopholes. Sometimes it pays to be an optimist, and I reckon Yahoo et al. are going to need all the encouragement they can get to convince record exec's that this is a Good Idea (TM).
I'm not going to be a
Then we might see some decent music being released unrestricted!
For some this may be good news, but for others it may be "Jessica Simpson's music is so crappy that they don't even need to DRM it, cause no one will even want to waste their bandwidth to pirate it."
I never thought I would live to see the day when a major (really major) company not only publicly supports but actually takes the plunge to sell non-DRM infested music. What's next? Sony will release a $199 PS3? (Har har...)
This kinda reminds me of Gmail. Back when it came out it was just unthinkable that a company would give you more than a few MBs of storage for free let alone a whole GB! Nowadays, everybody gives you at the minimum of 200MB. I think that Yahoo, like Gmail, just might profoundly shift the paradigm of online music distribution like Gmail changed the way we think of free email.
Is this the beginning of the end of DRM? Not quite yet IMO because the RIAA and MPAA are still run by idiots, but I think the day may come sooner than we think if more major players like Yahoo come on board.
-pentapenguin
I've seen reports that record companies aren't "happy" with the royalties they're getting from iTunes. Could higher-priced, DRM-free releases be part of their solution? Skeptical though I am, I hope so. Even though I have a Mac, an iPod, and many tracks I've bought from the iTunes store, I'd rather Apple not be the "only game in town" for music on my iPod. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, even through a reality distortion field I expect.
While she may not be high on the average Slashdot user's, i.e. male, perhaps older than 20, I believe the 13-16 crowd like her music and will beg mommy and daddy to get them the new Jessica song. Remember folks as much as you want it to be true the people who post here are not the majority in this country. I have a feeling this won't do that great because it is not offered by the iTunes Music Store but it is still a step in the right direction.
This much should be blindingly obvious. However, for the benefit of the people on the 8-bit bus:
1) This is a trial balloon. If it sells well, it may convince some retailers to experiment with further DRM free tracks. If it sells poorly, it will serve as "proof" that DRM is needed.
2) There's at least somebody on the command chain who wants this to fail. Hence the $1.99 price.
3) The record company couldn't stomach the idea of a totally naked mp3 so they came up with this lame idea of embedding the purchaser's name in the file. If course this is easily worked around, but so's regular DRM. This is to deter the teeming masses. If John Q. Moron decides to fileshare, he'll soon be indicted by a thousand copies of "Jessica Loves John Q. Moron" floating around. You might add that they were being slightly clever by selling this crude copy protection measure as a value added feature.
I'd also speculate that might be meant to caution Microsoft ever so lightly. MS is openly scheming against its current music partners by introducing Urge and Zune. But it wants to keep them hooked on Plays For Sure while making sure their services are inferior to its own offerings. This is Yahoo's way of saying, "Look Microsoft, we might not need your crap DRM after all, so watch yourself."
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Before getting all excited about Yahoos altruism, think about the business side.
Apple has what...80%... of the portable music player market?
Until apple decides to share their DRM, everyone else (including Yahoo) is locked out of the iPod market.
MP3s are their only way in. If they can manage to line up some labels, they will suddenly have access to a totally new and much larger customer base.
I'm ecstatic that Yahoo wants to offer unencumbered tunes. But $2.00 / song? That's more than I pay for a 16-bit PCM CD. Besides, they don't have to package, distribute (old-skool distribute, that is) or keep brick-and-mortars. I might get interested/serious if it were $2 / album ...
I've already spent $500 this year with allofmp3. I'm not opposed to spending, I'm just not going to play sucker to suckers.
What I never unterstood with the whole watermarking stuff is how they can help to avoid people putting tracks on some P2P network.
if the RIAA tracks down one of your songs you can simply explain it by "my pc got infected by a virus because MS didnt provide a patch for powerpoint. that virus had a P2P module that shared my whole hard drive on the net". alternatively you can say "i was in germany last month where copying tracks for friends is allowed. some of my friends must have given my track to some of their friend and so on. one of them must have been a bad person how put the song with my watermark on a p2p network".
how can you avoid this with watermarks?
What if you want to sell you collection or some steals it?
Yahoo said:
As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!
This translates into:
OMFG, for the love of god, PLEASE LET US SELL OUR SHIT TO IPOD USERS!!1!!!!!!1!1111!
Basically, what is happening is that all the non-iTunes are getting trounced by iTunes and the iPod. The music industry won't let them sell their music unless it has DRM. Apple isn't selling them the rights to use the DRM that the iPod uses and Apple sure as shit is not going to build in WMA DRM capabilities into the iPod. With iPods being roughly 80% of the MP3 market, this is a massive audience that Yahoo, Napster, Rhapsody, exc can't touch. They desperately want to sell, but they are not allowed to sell unless the music has DRM. Apple won't let them us an iPod compatible form of DRM.
This isn't a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they "want to work on other stuff". This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.
This is a play of self interested corporations. Apple wants to lock down the iPod not because they want to set music free, but because they want a monopoly over the service that fills iPods. Yahoo wants to sell DRM free music not because they give a shit about how irritating DRM is to you and me, but because they want to sell music to iPod users. The RIAA, well, they are just evil and eat babies.
Great, so now we can buy stuff we don't want the way we want it but we still cannot buy stuff we want.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
br0k_sams0n wrote:
This is one of my strongest reasons for avoiding DRMed music. No matter how long you own a track, it is only playable as long as you have a player that can play that specific DRM scheme. If that specific DRM scheme is not available (for example because of "upgrades" or the company went out of business), the tracks that you have legitimately paid for are worthless. With a non-DRM CD, I have music that I can listen to for life and hard proof that I actually brought the music.
I ahve the above experience with laserdisc (LD). I have a large number of movies in the format and a player for the discs. But once my LD wears out I doubt I will be able to purchase another player, rendering my collection unusable. I think that those with large collection of DRM music files may face the same problem in the future.
Concerning falling record sales, I think one of the biggest factors is the CD itself. In the past all audio formats eventually wore out, leading to a replacement purchase. This is one of the factors that led to Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon to stay on the charts for over a decade.
It was possible to extend the life of a recording by copying it for your own use, but eventually you would still have to rebuy the original. Again, this led to more sales. It also increased sales of blank media.
But with CD, you buy it once and it is good for life. My first CDs, that I bought 20 years ago, are just as playable today as they were when I bought them. There is no need to rebuy the same music again and again. In the same way, if DRMed compressed files are not acceptable to the consumer, buying the CD and making your own files avoid the entire issue and you can choose both the format and bitrate yourself and the player that you want to use.
Now the CD has matured, and people have rebought as much of their old catalog in the CD format as their are going to. I think this, more than anything else, is what has led to the drop in CD sales. If you already own every Beatles song on CD, how many more Beatles CDs will you be willing to buy? How much Beatles music at all (not counting releases of unreleased material)?
If the Record Industry wants to increase music sales, there are two things I can think of that would help:
When I first saw this story I was excited, Yahoo for Yahoo!
I have no interest in Barbi Simpson stuff, but I knew it was just one song so far and I was still all revved up that they were FINALLY getting a clue and finally letting people buy the MP3s they want to buy. So I didn't much care when I saw it was Barbi Simpson, and I was thinking of buying a download just to buy MP3 downloads.
Oh, did I say Barbi Simpson? Sorry, I mean Jessica Simpson.
And then I see the ASSHATS want to rape us for DOUBLE THE PRICE for the privilege of being able to buy MP3s. Instant and complete 180 reversal in my reaction to Yahoo. My excitement immediately did a 180-flip into anger. They offer some crappy random Jessica Simpson song, fine whatever I'm still excited and I'll buy it. They want to charge the already inflated "industry standard" price of $0.99 for the crappy song, fine whatever I'm still excited and I'll buy it. The FUCKTARDS have the gall to slap a DOUBLE pricetag for the privilege of an MP3?
I was all "Way-to-go-Yahoo!". Now I just want to see Yahoo in a smouldering crater of bankruptcy and dismemberment.
I don't need some random name "Aaron" or "Zena" plastered over the song for an extra dollar. If they would like to offer an option to plaster in some selected name for an extra buck, as an optional offer in addition to offering song for a buck, fine, they can offer that too. If they offer the song for a buck maybe I'd forgive them enough to buy the lousy Barbi Simpson song just for the "privilege" to be able to buy an MP3.
Oh, did I say Barbi Simpson? Sorry, I mean Jessica Simpson.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You know what? I don't care.
;-)
There are two reasons to oppose DRM - "personal convenience" and "a licence to pirate".
While I've been known to pirate in the past (hell, who hasn't?), my main objection to DRM is that once I buy the file I want to own it. I don't want anyone telling me I can only play it on certain makes of MP3 player, can't transcode it to Ogg Vorbis, stream it to other PCs in my house, etc.
Finally a mainstream media company has somehow persuaded the idiots at the RIAA to allow unDRMed downloads on a trial basis. This is a good thing.
Frankly, anyone who opposes DRMed music primarily because it allows them to pirate and distribute is a thief^H^H^H^H^H copyright violator, and should shut up and sit down now to avoid fucking things up for everyone else.
While I appreciate the OP's information on the watermarking technology, it's completely irrelevant - there's no excuse for sharing the MP3 of this track, now there's an affordable (expensive, sure, but it's only a test), unDRMed cross-platform, mainstream outlet to legally purchase it from.
Anyone pirating this track is frankly working against the chances of the RIAA dropping DRM - you will be ruining a brave (if overdue) experiment, and directly contributing to a future of omnipresent DRM lock-in.
Regardless of what you think of the artist or the song, the sales figures for this track likely dictate the entire future position of the RIAA/music industry. Pirating it is the worst kind of short-term-gain idiocy.
I hate Jessica Simpson and the MP3's overpriced, but I'll be buying this track - and if you're anti-DRM (as opposed to pro-piracy), so should you.
</advocacy>
(Let the accusations of shilldom fly...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Aside from two bucks PER TRACK being absurd (especially for music I don't happen to like)...Does anyone see that this may utterly stab us in the back? The people that like this genre of music may not understand the significance of DRM-free software and thus not care to spend the extra money on it (which even if I wanted the song two bucks is out of my price range, typically I buy CDs that are 13 dollars or less for 12 to 15 songs). I can see sales of this flopping and the RIAA saying "Hey look, we tried offering DRM-free music but the public didn't buy it. They demand DRM in their music. We now have a mandate from the people to give them the DRM that they want"
I am going to buy it. I hate Top 40 music, I am going to delete right after I pay for it, but it is a legitimate sale of DRM free music, even if it is only one song out of many. If this song sells strong and fast, it will send a message to the industry. They may not listen, but at least I did my part. Now do yours. If even half of the readers of /. dropped a couple of bucks to send a message, it will have an impact. That isn't being optimistic, it is a statement of fact. We all waste more money daily on smokes, Snickers and iced low-fat latte with a double shot of Irish Cream flavor.
Make your vote!!!! Buy this shitty song.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O