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Music Companies Mull Ditching DRM
PoliTech writes to mention an International Herald Tribue article that is reporting the unthinkable: Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their mp3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without 'rights management' technologies attached. The article notes that this is a step the recording industry vowed 'never to take'. From the article: "Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place."
From the article:
Most of the push for music unencumbered by digital rights management, or DRM, systems over the past six months has come from technology, electronics and Internet companies. In part, it is because these companies have been largely unsuccessful in their efforts to produce digital locks that are simple and flexible for the consumer, foolproof to the hacker and workable on numerous makes and models of players.Which is why DRM is quite useless. Come on -- if worse came to worse, people would play the music on the stereos and record it using digital recorders then run it through their favorite piece of audio manipulating software and have just about the same quality recording. The music industry cannot hope to stop the myriad of innovative ways of copying music and they are fooling themselves if they think they can make DRM "unbreakable." If this report is true, perhaps some in the industry are finally coming to their senses.
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I doubt Apple would ever switch to MP3s. They've got too much invested in their format to abandon it now. However, I think that if the music industry would let them they'd be more than happy to sell unprotected AAC files. They've gotten as far as they have because of the iPod itself, not the DRM locking users into the system. If you ask iPod users without any iTunes Music Store purchases if they'd switch players when it's time to upgrade, I doubt more than a small percentage plan to follow their iPod up with anything else.
In a previous post on a different article, I commented that the music industry was stupid not to look at the success of allofmp3.com and learn from it. While allofmp3 was bad for the RIAA in that the revenue stream broke down between the user and the RIAA (it ended at allofmp3), its success proved that users ARE willing to pay for their content if provided conveniently at a reasonable price in a usable format.
In short, they need to make themselves cost competitive with P2P. How do you make yourself cost competitive with something that is free?
The same way people compete with (and/or make money from) freely available open-source software. Don't market the product itself, market convenience associated with that product. For open-source software, that convenience is packaging and tech support/customization contracts. For music, that convenience is selection and a guarantee of quality. allofmp3 succeeded for three reasons:
Very low prices (Probably too low for the RIAA's tastes, but even twice the price of allofmp3 would have appealed to many. RIAA could make up for the low per-track revenue via significantly higher volume. e.g. back in the days of pyMusique, I bought quite a few single $1 tracks, but no complete albums. With allofmp3, I frequently would purchase an entire album for $3-$4 even though I was only looking for one track from that album initially.)
Convenience - allofmp3 had a great selection that made it far easier to find music than on any P2P network. Only the RIAA has the capability to actually beat that selection. Also, people would be more willing to give credit card info to a "trusted" source rather than a clearly shady Russian company with apparent mob ties.
Last, but clearly not least - no DRM. DRM goes way beyond nullifying the above "convenience aspect", and in fact makes P2P the more convenient option, free or not.
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The music companies seem to think that by making online music without DRM, they will help their sagging sales. I don't think that what plagues the industry. Like all industries, the music industry wants growth every year. But they compare sales today to what it was in the boom days. Back then, sales were booming because the CD was replacing tape and vinyl as the preferred medium. The industry didn't seem to see that some sales were people replacing their collection as opposed to buying new music. There are other reasons too (some which were self-inflicted), and it was covered in a Frontline episode called The Way the Music Died that chronicles the music industry today.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I suspect they expected the PlayForSure side to prevail. PlayForSure meant an atomized online music market. It meant no single company dominated it. It meant labels still controlled access to the market.
But Apple prevailed. FairPlay prevents current iTMS customers from switching to another online music store. It ensures current iTMS customers remain future iTMS customers. FairPlay is the cornerstone of Apple's total domination on the (legal) online music market. It means Apple controls the access to the market, and no longer the music labels.
Every time a customer downloads a song that is infested with DRM at the request of the RIAA, record labels are putting an additional nail into their own coffin. If they want to break free from Apple's de facto monopoly, they have to drop the DRM requirement. Looks like they finally got it.
It will be interesting to see. Personally, DRM IS the #1 reason I don't buy more music. I can't be bothered fooling around with p2p networks. Busy, bad quality, lawsuits, spyware, etc. Unacceptable. On the other hand, I don't want to buy from places like iTunes - though I occasionally do - because I'm already irked about CDs I can't locate or that suffered damage when moving that I can't rip. I'm not interested in a bunch of music I won't be able to play when Apple goes bankrupt or only produces mp3 players I hate. (long live the iPod)
But am I normal? I don't think so. Some of my other technical co-workers have argued that iTunes and the iPod have won massive acceptance via ease of use, and that's all most people think about. I'm not completely in concurrence: I think people know that "mp3" means fully cross-platform compatible. No matter what you're using for software or hardware, the mp3s will play. People confused about what will work - iTunes, iPod, Zune, playsforsure, Rhapsody, ogg, m4p, m4a, aac - could easily get dizzy from the myriad technologies in play, and simply not want to buy. They get iPods, rip their CDs, and that's that.
I don't think that DRM-free music will kill filesharing. But I am quite certain it will not ENABLE more filesharing. It's already trivial, and frankly, p2p networks are now overrated. People have built such monstrous mp3 collections and storage is now cheap that the duplication is happening en masse. People who connect in real life can easily swap gigs of data. Broadband is more widely deployed, and a simple memory stick with 2GB worth of music is a fast way to distribute massive amounts of music. Or burn a data DVD.
But even if DRM inhibits online music sales to would-be legitimate customers like myself, is that sufficient? Would music priced at $.99/song and $9.99/album be sufficient to attract? Certainly I'd buy a fair bit. I'm not at all against flexible pricing, because I buy music for the long haul, and my interest in collecting the latest hits is nil. I'd prefer access to a backcatalog for less, over $.99 fresh hits. (Although they could price the backcatalog cheaper AND still cap at $.99)
Either way, DRM is bad for consumers, bad for music, and AT BEST non-impactful for record companies. Removing it may not save them, but it won't hurt them. There's only upside here.
When, in the last decade, has Apple shown any reluctance to abandon proprietary technologies, in which they had a large investment, rather than adopt industry standards? Hm, lets see:
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to PCI. They've got too much invested in Nubus to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to IDE. They've got too much invested in SCSI to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB. They've got too much invested in ADB to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB2. They've got too much invested in Firewire to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to Intel CPUs. They've got too much invested in PowerPC to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to PDF. They've got too much invested in QuickDraw to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to VGA/DVI. They've got too much invested in their proprietary video connector to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to a multi-button mouse. They've got too much invested in the single button mouse to abandon it now.
Apple just hasn't shown, in the last 10 years, any reluctance to abandon existing, home-grown, technologies when the market has provided an adequate alternative.Besides, the iPod and iTunes already support MP3s, all Apple would need to do is switch the format that iTunes uses to distibute purchased music.
just a ghost in the machine.
God, it never ceases to amaze me the extremes that people are willing to explain away to justify the companies that they like. And then they never miss an opportunity to read evil into the actions of a company that they dislike.
News: Apple doesn't sell music without DRM. Response: Oh, the labels won't let them.
News: Some labels gave Apple the opportunity to sell music without DRM, but Apple refuses. Response: Oh, what if there was a mistake? The legality! Apple is safer this way.
Give me a break.
And just as bad is the post above about how Apple only uses a proprietary DRM to combat Microsoft's EVIIIL proprietary DRM.