Slashdot Mirror
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 TFA:
Makes me wonder if they're not motivated to undermine Apple, who fought tooth and nail to maintain $0.99/download against the industry's will.
The record industry views the Occident, paradoxically, with more suspicion than the Orient, though we're their biggest customers; it wouldn't surprise me, therefore, if they began to roll this out first in the East:
Can someone say, “chutzpah?”
From where I stand (or sit) DRM wasn't much of an issue, as it was released it was promptly circumvented. I am old enough to recall buying vinyl and when CD technology was introduced the complaint then was the cost of CD's.
The music companies said the cost would come down with acceptance of the tech but it never really did come down.
God bless the Internet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I doubt that. It'll probably end up being them claiming it was their great idea all along and it's "best for the artists" and blah blah blah. They would never admit that DRM is a failure.
But it also has to be reasonably priced. The iTunes price of $10, £8 or 10 per album isn't actually much cheaper than what you can get on the high street and you can buy a full CD for similar prices on Amazon.
That is not reasonably priced. People expect lower prices when they receive less and when it costs less to distribute.
I might very rarely buy an album at £8, but at £4 I would probably buy every album I like.
Those who think that this would somehow immediately undermine Apple's dominance with the iPod are misguided as to why the iPod is successful imho.
/.ers might like to see Apple's DRM solely as a lock-in scheme, and while no doubt Apple finds any lock-in a reassuring safety net in case they do someday drop the ball on iPod design, for the moment (and for the foreseeable future with the iPhone) Apple doesn't *need* lock-in. The iPod isn't selling because people have huge collections of .m4ps they need to keep compatibility with, it's selling because it's slickly good at what it does and it's a brand a lot of people are pleasantly familiar with.
The tinfoil headgear sporting subset of
The simple reality is that if the Music companies start allowing DRM-less downloads, then Apple will probably make even *more* money selling iPods than they are now, as more people start to buy unencrypted music via their computers to put on said iPods. In the long term their share of music sales may be hurt, but as the world's 4th largest seller of music, they already have plenty of momentum and market power; combined with their slick store and integration in iTunes, I would think they can do just fine in a less partitioned market, and retain a good deal of influence with the music industry selling unencrypted music.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Last week I had a chat with the former managing director of one of the big four labels in my country (and in a few others as well). His personal opinion is that DRM has to go. When asked directly, he stated that in the music industry boardrooms, about 50% of the people are by now convinced that it has to go, whereas 50% have not yet reached that point. One of the things that's holding them back, is that the movie and especially the games industries are putting pressure on the music one not to drop DRM because they fear the domino effect.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Can you imagine what "mulling" is like at the executive level of these big music publishers?
A roomful of people unfit to work in any industry not underwritten by a century-old monopoly. Whose added value lies in conning artists into working for a tiny fraction of the value they create, or their weight in drugs, whichever is less. Or in conning consumers to pay over and again for either some good products produced as "pop" generations ago, or some awful products produced more recently that they sell to children as soundtracks to free music videos and the lives of talentless celebrity models.
These people don't "mull". All they can do is whine and fail when their crooked old tricks don't work so good any more. Years of lying about DRM and piracy hasn't reversed the drop in their profits, as the least-dumb people have all fled their business. Their decisions are made mainly by listening to tech vendors tricking them into broken tech protection of a broken business model, instead of changing the model. If they do drop DRM before they go permanently broke, it'll be because they can't afford it themselves, or just because they screw up their stupid strategy by making irrecoverable mistakes implementing it.
Information might not want to be free, but nature abhors a vacuum. The empty space at the top of the music content pyramid is sucking control of all that content inevitably out to unimpeded access by any consumer who wants it.
--
make install -not war
The record companies have made most of their revenue selling unprotected CDs (and unprotected tapes and unprotected vinyl discs). Selling non-DRM music is a known good, safe, conservative, proven business model to which the record companies owe just about every penny they have. Without this business model, they simply wouldn't exist today.
DRM was a radical, speculative tell-the-customers-fuck-you-we-don't-want-your-mon ey-go-away model that has a track record of failing. Look at the software industry of the 1980s when copy protection was widely used. It didn't make a dent in piracy (because no one ever invented copy protection that actually works), but the interoperability problems sure as hell pissed people off (e.g. "whaddya mean this won't run on my new AT?!?", "whaddya mean my defrag utility trashed the 'secret' sector that wasn't allocated to a file?!?") and increased support costs.
Nobody knows if the record companies will actually decide to continue to remain in the having-customers business, but one thing is for sure: it's the obvious no-brainer thing to do, if protecting/increasing shareholder value is anywhere on their list of priorities. There's nothing controversial about wanting to maximize profits. Telling customers, "sorry, our new product isn't compatible with your equipment, costs more, and doesn't work as well as what you're used to, because we really just don't like you, so please buy someone else's music instead" on the other hand, is pretty out-there.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You want good music with a way to preview online and no marketing madness?
:)
:) (brobdingnagian bards and jonathan coulton if you're curious)
:)
It sounds like you're not aware of www.cdbaby.com
They sell CDs of independent musicians with $6-$12 from each CD sold going to the musician. You can listen to songs via a stream so you can hear before you buy. I dunno how large thier selection is, I just know they carried the two groups I was wanting.
I'm like you, except that I just boycotted the RIAA labels. There's no need to needlessly deprive myself, especially when there's starting to be good alternatives out there.
Because practically the second they start offering DRM-free music in a format that is of relatively high quality (say 128Kbps MP3 or better--the current standard) and is delivered online (meaning you don't have to rip your CD's, which already are mostly DRM-free), the recording industry will have signed their own death warrant.
Most people I know are already obtaining the majority of their music files via some means other than outright, legitimate purchases--even when they understand that I am a recording musician and that at least part of my livelihood depends upon the ability to sell my recordings. Even some recording musicians I know do the same thing. DRM is the only method by which profit can be extracted from digital media sales, barring other barrier technologies (it's currently time-consuming and/or difficult to transfer CDs and DVDs, and storage requirements and processing power required are still relatively expensive, and bandwidth isn't what it needs to be quite yet for high-quality delivery of large files--however, all of these problems are well on their way to being solved).
Now, you may argue whether or not this is a good thing or not, but for my own part, I believe the end result will be a net detriment to society. Granted, it will break the power of the large studios, but it will also break the profit model entirely for everyone. Technology does not discriminate between a greedy studio exec and an individual musician. You may spare us your ideas on how to make a decent living as a musician sans the sale of recordings unless you yourself are prepared to hit the road and perform night after night. Those of us who have done it already know it doesn't work very well.
Unfortunately, I also believe that in the end, no DRM scheme is workable in the long term, both for technical and ethical reasons, but human nature is what it is, and secrets aren't secrets if two people know them.
You think the state of our musical culture is bad now thanks to the RIAA? Wait until DRM is gone. I guarantee you'll regret it.