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 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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
next thing you know, they'll be using OSS editing tools
then servers...
After that?
It'll be pandemonium, they'll be joyfully frolicking in the free and open streets... Arms flailing, chainsaws revved...
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
...right after I get back from my ski trip to hell :-)
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
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."
Microsoft cripples Vista with DRM and the potential users of DRM don't want it?
Oh, the irony.
Vinyl? They make siding out of that right?
PAIN, and now the Music Biz is feeling pain, so they have to adapt. What else can they do? Their monopoly is over, but they should understand that most 'ordinary folks' will prefer to download music from a legal site, and those same folks dont understand DRM, they just want it to work. .....Its amazing that Apple hasnt taken over the world with that notion of 'it just works'.
"It's a trap!"
-Admiral Akbar
(What? That quote didn't originate on Fark? Oh, frak.)
Though I think the practicality of doing the kind of recording you're talking about is minimal, the underlying truth is valid: where there's a will there's a way.
What we are talking about here is basically securing something. You are securing data against copying. Ask anybody in the security industry if there's such a thing as a security system that cannot be broken. If they say that such a beast exists, they are trying to sell you said mythological creature and you should run quickly.
All you can do with security is hope to make something secure enough that it's not worth somebody's trouble to break it. The problem is that only one person has to break the security to make the entire security regime worthless. Furthermore, efforts to increase the security generally increase the complexity and risk making it difficult for legitimate customers to make use of the product.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It is very good that they are considering to ditching DRM.
But its not by their own will they are considering that, its because they have to.
Now, DRM-less music is fair. I will never ever buy DRM-crippled music.
I wonder what prices they will take, low, reasonable or overpriced?
Either way, just because its fair with the non-DRM music, does not mean I will just forget what they did and happily and gladly buy their music now even if its not DRM-crippled.
All their lobbying, scare tactics, intimidation, and evilness. I won't forget that. I don't forget that easily.
Current DRM is mostly useful for locking the consumers into one single vendor for their mp3 players. It might give the record companies some benefit in the long run, as customers would have to buy their music a second time if they buy a new mp3 player, but it certainly eats into their profits right now.
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
Perhaps, they are realizing that DRM is causing them to lose not only revenue (in terms of people buying less) but market share (people buying elsewhere). I used to buy music that I heard on the radio like everyone else. Since the Sony rootkit mess I get my music from eMusic. I've found a lot of great bands/labels. Now, no matter what the major labels do, I'll never go back to them 100%. Another less techie friend of mine just recently got fed up with iTunes DRM and ask me to help find something else... guess where I'm pointing.
the more miserable you are now, the funnier the story will be later
Stupid comment of the day, courtesy of the article: In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. "We're for interoperability," he said, "and there's nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability."
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.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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
Please tell me that's sarcasm. I can already hear the footsteps of all the 'iTunes is teh evil DRM' trolls thundering over to agree ... *shudders*
I mean, sure they're funny to watch, kinda like that little kitten that's so determined that it's going to catch you and drag you off by your ankle. At some point, though, you start to feel like you really ought to just put them out of their misery-- after all, they can't really be happy like that, can they?
-Q (whose iTunes library, incidentally, contains only four or five albums from the iTMS)
If you ripped your own CD's, then they are not copy-protected and you are not in any way committed to Apple or Apple's DRM. Use the tracks on any player or computer that supports AAC (if that's what you ripped them to), or use iTunes or another app to convert them to any format you want.
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.
But I thought we needed harder DRM because the flagging sales were caused by those Evil Content Pirates(tm)!!!!!
I'm so confused, I don't know what to believe anymore!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And I used to buy a lot of CD's. I buy fewer now, because I'm older and pickier, and I've looked at iTunes and other stores, but I just didn't want to have to go through the buy, burn, rip cycle to remove the DRM. If the label actually allow drm'less mp3's, and make it as easy to buy as an iTune purchase, I'll buy a lot more music a song at a time on impulse.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
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.
The Economics of a matter drive behaviour. DRM is not economically viable. The RIAA is greedy, but they aren't stupid. Follow me:
*It costs money to produce new DRM schemes.
*DRM is easily and routinely cracked or bypassed by pirates.
*The people who want to pirate will pirate, the people who willingly buy music will continue to do so.
Abandoning, or at least containing DRM is just a matter of time and is really just an acceptance of reality. It's pointless and costly. Even if they don't totally abandon DRM, I can see them giving up on building the perfect scheme and just sticking with the easily bypassed and/or cracked schemes they have now. If someone claims that it somehow cost-effective to try and stay a step ahead of the pirates' ability to crack DRM, I'd say that person is deluding himself. And once it becomes too costly to keep up the arms race, they will stop. I'd say we're close to that point.
blah blah blah
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.
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.
AAC or OGG please, but not MP3 - you need twice the bitrate for comparable quality :(
h tm
Can we please just put this myth to bed once and for all? I mean Christ, this test was posted right here on this site, years ago: http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.
Scroll to the bottom - the difference in quality is negligible at the same bit rate. It always has been (well, ever since LAME popped up). And given the tradeoff in convenience and industry support, I'd take mp3 any day of the week.
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'.
Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.
A few bands jumping ship to go to a non-DRM music site is probably the biggest clue stick they got. If they don't have a monopoly on the artists, they have no control. These are desprate times for the labels. Bare Naked Ladies has gone to e-music. Some of the newer TSB stuff is not on RIAA cartel labels. (Too bad the Wizards of Winter track is in a RIAA cartel album. It's the reason I haven't bought it yet.)
The RIAA cartel labels have to make a big move fast before this leak grows and takes down the ship. They are busy trying to patch the P-P hole with a product that doesn't sell well because it is mostly useless to most people.
Maybe soon I can buy tracks in MP3 that I can play besides some obscure indi stuff on e-music.
Remember, I have rejected DRM music tracks and stuck with the most universal standard in the world. MP3's play on my flash player, all my computers, my DVD player (as MP3 CD) and in my car.
No other format is that compatible in my mixed environment. The incompatible DRM formats has kept me out of online music stores. Now if they will do something about the price fixing at a high price. Even better would be to fix the "for private home use only" restrictions so I can also legaly do one of the Christmas Light Shows, or play a ripped CD with a wedding slide show at a wedding reception, and post the video without breaking a bunch of license clauses in the process.
They have no simple way to use CD's in any public performance such as a public light show, a public wedding slide show, or DJ'ing the reception dance as an amature DJ. All these public performances are prohibited by the Private Home use clause.
I would have bought lots of music if I could have actualy used it. It was too restricted to be of much use in todays world. DRM was just icing on the cake making the expensive product even less useful.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
i guess it depends on what your idea of 'making a decent living' is... i think the days of the super star musicians are far from over -- we will always have the uber-pop superstar favorite of the week who's albums go platinum the week they are released...
but, being a musician is being an artist, and unfortunatly most artists don't get paid well in the u.s. The internet and non-DRM'ed music isn't to blame for why the recording artists are having trouble making money, its the broken profit model. recording and distribution used to be mega expensive. Now i can buy a computer for 3,000 bucks that will allow me to create studio quality recorded music. i can buy add a video camera for another 2 or 3 thousand, and now can create studio quality video. I'm not really sure why the record companies still spend hundred's of thousands to produce a record, but you just don't have to, and the smaller and newer artists are just starting to figure that out. People aren't spending less money on music, they are just spending it differently.
sorry to be harsh, but maybe we would be better off with musicians who didn't care so much about making a living, and were really just into music
That sounds fishy. The MP3 decoding algorithm is specified to the bit level, within certain tolerances (according to Wikipedia). All of the audio tweaks are supposed to happen on the encoding side.
let me tell you one thing,
...
if they sold the songs in mp3, high quality format, and guaranteed that they will be available forever, i would not even bother saving zillions of mp3 in my hard disks and trying to transport them to new pcs, friends', relatives', acquintances' computers, worry about the loss of mp3s in the event of a hd format is needed (windows reinstall etc), and so on, and instead just DELETE them whenever im in distress and just get what i want from the OFFICIAL site for 1 cents per song again.
same goes for movies. WHY the hell try to maintain them in cds, dvds or etc when you can just download them in high quality format from its ORIGINAL seller ? JUST sell it for something reasonable, NEGLIGIBLE - for maybe, say, $5 ? It is not even the price of a regular hamburger dammit ? WHENEVER i want to watch a movie, i would just download it, watch, and delete without any worries. No disk space use, no corruption, hell and even no worries that children might find and watch some no-no movies for their age
Games. god. If games were sold for $5 or so a piece, why not buy MANY games ? huh ? Just for the sake of trying, there is no barrier to buying them $5 per piece. Even the thought that, 'i might want to play something like this maybe sometime' would without any worries of expensiveness or anything would let anyone buy the games they would NOT normally buy then. Heck, even for collections maybe.
Actually, the execs, policy makers and old coots in the helm of media companies, you are witless idiots.
Have you gone such a road, internet would be busy with zillions of terabytes downloaded everyday from your products and you would be busy trying to get more accountants to do the accounting instead of lawyers for trying to fight against 'the people'.
Read radical news here