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Music Execs Think DRM Slows the Marketplace

Posted by kdawson on from the well-duh dept.

MacGod writes "From BBC News comes a story about a Jupiter Research survey conducted before Steve Jobs's anti-DRM essay, indicating that most music industry execs see DRM-free music as a way to expand sales on digital tracks. The survey covered large and small record labels, rights bodies, digital stores, and technology providers. To summarize: 54% of music execs think that current DRM is too restrictive and 62% think selling unencumbered music would be a way to boost sales. Even limiting the survey to the record labels themselves, 48% believe this. Yet, many also believe it's not going to happen without significant governmental intervention — even though most insiders think DRM is harmful, the labels are keen to stick with it. Is this yet another sign of the typical media industry 'head in the sand, refuse to change' approach, or might we be seeing the early stages or some actual change?"

2 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. OK I am really confused. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I was confused by the summary at first, and now that I've R'ed TFA, I am no more enlightened. The article says that music industry execs think they can boost sales with unencumbered music, but that music labels won't allow this to happen, and that in the future music execs want DRM to allow them to manage their rights rather than encumber music.

    So, can somebody please explain:

    (1) What is the difference between the music industry execs and the people who run the labels, and

    (2) If the music industry execs are saying they do or the don't want DRM?

    Thanks.

  2. Re:Alvislujia by TheMeuge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I disagree. I think that they've seen what happened to their MPAA buddies when they spent countless millions developing DRM for HD-DVD and BluRay, only to see them broken before the sales got off the ground.

    I always had a sense that while the RIAA execs had the information about the uselessness of DRM all along, their greed and anger was too great for them to admit it to anyone, especially themselves. But this recent fiasco, along with a very high profile essay by Jobs might have just been enough to jolt them into realizing that the reason that they're losing money, is because they're failing at their primary business model - music distribution.

    They got so caught in copyright protection that for awhile it seemed like this was their primary focus. It was almost clear that the RIAA lawsuits were becoming a profitable side-business in the form of outright racketeering and extortion.

    But perhaps the decreasing sales of CDs in the context of a flourishing DVD business, and very healthy iTMS sales, they've finally come to their senses.

    The goal of RIAA is to distribute music at a price to the consumer. So that's what they should be doing. If the labels got together, and opened an online music shop with non-DRM custom-format/bitrate downloads from 96kbps to uncompressed, a-la-AllOfMP3, they'd make a killing!

    So perhaps long-term greed reinforced by reality and logic has finally triumphed over old-school throat-ripping greed...