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EMI — Ditching DRM is Going To Cost You
33rpm writes "EMI has told online music stores that selling its catalog without DRM is going to cost them a lot of money. 'EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.'"
So this basically proves that DRM exists for the sole purpose of providing record companies with silly amounts of longterm income by reselling stuff we already own? Excellent news.
$9.99 albums of lossy content and no physical medium supposedly make up for the fact that I have no recourse if I lose the data I purchased. So how can they justify charging more than that (closing in on the average cost of a CD) when it costs them money to have the CDs pressed, packaged, and sent to stores?
They can't. This is simply an attempt to say, "see, we tried to go DRM-less but people wouldn't do it."
Fuck that.
EMI &mdash Ditching DRM is Going To Cost You
;)
As are en dashes and semicolons
Sony ha
Someone needs to show me a study that incorporates similar (if not identical) stores and similar (again, if not identical) pricing on a DRM version and DRM-free version of the SAME song. My money is that the DRM-free version makes a lot more money, simply because of its ease-of-use. Hell, I'd even be willing to fork up that extra $.99 (if the song they did this with didn't SUCK.)
Funny, considering one of the main reasons I won't buy DRM products is it already costs more to do so. If I want my favorite Britney song from Itunes, it costs 99 cents. If I want a ringtone of the same thing, Verizon charges me up to a couple bucks for a much smaller clip of exactly the same song. Why would I pay twice for something I can rip from my (wifes') CD and create myself anyway? Don't they see it's costing THEM more money in the long run to include this garbage?
Funnypics
I knew EMI was a bunch of greedy bastards, and I'm not surprised about that; however, I find it very troubling that mdash, an *excellent* HTML entity, has turned to the dark side like this. Really, I never saw it coming.
Read this: Emmy Noether on DRM
Hello and welcome to my malt shop chain, TurdShakes(TM), featuring shakes made from genuine excrement, in a secret family recipe that is sure to please.
Am I serious, you ask? Of course I am! I am quite passionate about my flagship product, the TurdShake(TM), and stand behind it totally even though sales have been slightly disappointing. That is to say, not quite as successful as I had hoped. Frankly, I'm shocked by the fact that nobody wants to buy milkshakes made from excrement. Im my eyes, TurdShakes(TM) were a goldmine waiting to happen.
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Once she left him for that fancy nbsp, it was all over.
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It is not just the question of making profits though. They want and need to be able to _maximize profit_ for their company and shareholders. When they can say that DRM free media is the avenue which will yield the most profit, they will go that route. Again, it is not enough to just make money, they need to make the most they can with the product they sell. Right now, DRM'ed media appears to hold the promise of maximized profit.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
So they have a strategy of unknown risk and reward, and they're quite happy to go about it if someone else takes the risk but doesn't benefit from the reward.
Here's my counter proposal. I'll pay the upfront cost. I get to choose how much I charge. My cut is double what they pay Apple.
We are going DRM-less in droves. EMI and friends can go with us or not.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
For $10 I can buy a physical CD, and get: 1) Liner notes. 2) Artwork. 3) Plastic casing. 4) Plastic compact disc. 5) Files on said disc which are lossless. I can then convert the lossless files into any format I want depending on my needs, put them on my iPod, put them on my hdd. If I lose the CD, I still have the files. If I lose my iPod, or my hdd, I have the CD. Why would I spend $10 on low-quality files that are DRM-infected that I can't do shit with, and that I can lose much easier? Oh yea, I won't. -ACA
That should tell EMI that their extortion price is not "what the market will bear".
Sounds like EMI went to the SCO school of pricing.
allofmp3.com would like to thank you for your business. It knows you have no choice in DRMless online retailers who offer high quality files without DRM at a good price (well, with the exception of magnatune, but they have a limited catalog), and appreciate your choosing them for your online music needs.
Loose lips lose spit.
That seems like a plausible argument, but then like most things in life it's not that simple. I'm not willing to dare and guess the amount of money that music and video provides to some of our nations economies. Think of all the shops that will close, the people that will lose their jobs and the public uproar that will follow. Most of us live in a society where we've been fed this for our entire lives - it wouldn't go down too well if it was taken away from us. Then there's the bands (let's be fair, most movies are made by multi-million pound companies). There are some remarkable musical talents out there and unless we buy direct from them they're sure to find other ways of making money.
I'm all for de-commercialisation and the cutting out of the 'fat cats' but stopping our spending altogether seems a little drastic. DRM is a proce that needn't be paid, it's just an excuse to sponge more money from us.
is how much its going to cost them in lost sales through pissing off customers by keeping DRM.
Some readers have indicated to us that they'd happily pay more for DRM-free downloadable music from an online retailer, yet it is unclear as to why DRM-free music should cost more. To return to a point made famous by Steve Jobs, the overwhelming majority of CDs sold today already come without DRM on the discs. Furthermore, pirated copies of music are readily available online. As a result, it's not very clear to us why online music that is sold without DRM would need to cost more, but given the razor-thin margins in that market, a "no DRM tax" is quite likely to be passed on directly to consumers.
I'm not sure where I've seen any evidence the music industry is running on razor-thin margins. This sounds like pure BS, and only hurts their credibility every time they try to state their "case"... So far, I'm not convinced.
A more interesting question is why the music industry thinks that DRM matters. Their logic violates a very simple law of computers: if one copy exists in an unprotected form, all copies exist in an unprotected form. If somebody says "Hey, check out this cool song," and somebody else asks, "Can I get a copy of that," and the answer is, "No, it has DRM, but you can download it from eMule," that's not an improvement over "Sure, here's a copy." Actually, it's worse than "Sure, here's a copy" because it is encouraging the second person to pirate the music, while giving someone a copy is encouraging that person to watch for other music by that band and maybe buy the CD.
And I'll say it again: ignoring the one-hit-wonder teeny-pop crap, real musicians benefit overwhelmingly from music piracy. It increases exposure, which in the long term, increases sales. Therefore, all anti-piracy measures are, by definition, short-sighted foolishness by people who don't understand the basics of doing business in a modern economy. Is it any wonder, then, that music sales continue to be in the toilet despite substantially decreased piracy? Guess what? Music copying and sharing was going on before Napster. The only thing that Napster did was bring it out into the open where the industry could total it up and say "Oh, no, we're losing all these sales!" when in reality, by shutting down those services and annoying their customer/fan base, they really killed one of their biggest sources of advertising....
But I guess some people will never learn.
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The contracts for the labels are all wildly different but all of them consist of at least technical due diligence (what are YOU going to do to make sure OUR content does not fall into the wrong hands), financial due diligence, and a marketing plan. This is heavy stuff and can takes months and months to push through. In short, this is a very time-consuming and spendy process to go through.
EMI, under the digital music strategy of Ted Cohen, has far and away been the most open of the majors when it comes to licensing. They are simply making an attempt to protect their assets... since it takes so much effort on both sides to conclude a licensing agreement, it makes sense that they (the majors) want to recoup as much of that investment up-front as they possibly can.
People on Slashdot get this wrong all of the time. You see, the majors and the digital music services are in a death-match, with the DMS being hounded by the customer and the majors being hounded by the shareholders. The ONE thing that binds all of those people together (with the possible exception of the customer) is DRM. The major feels a little more secure "knowing" that their music can't be mass-reproduced, the DMS is happy because they can sell the content, the customer is happy because they can get the content, and the shareholder is happy because, well, there is an additional revenue stream.
And FYI...I have never met a music executive who DOES NOT understand that DRM is nearly useless as far as protection of content goes. BUT... as I said above, it is the glue that keeps everything together.
Go spend some time on Digital Music News to fully understand what is going on in the industry. It's not so simple and you cannot say definitively that DRM is harming the consumer because RIGHT NOW the only way to get that content is with DRM. Better than nothing, isn't it? Things will eventually change and this announcement from EMI is a very positive step forward. Don't trash the music industry as a whole until you understand it. I am certainly not saying it is full of kind-hearted souls (very far from it!) but there is more to it than just "let's fuck the consumer and the artist to make a buck!".
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but... what I don't understand, is why EMI hasn't yet figured out how that DRM costs them money?
I went into a CD store recently, saw a number of alums for sale by EMI, considered buying them, but saw the largely-printed "DRM" warning. Perhaps I'm unusual, but this prevented me from buying a single one of those albums. If not for the DRM, I would've bought one of the albums, and I would have likely purchased the others over time. Over the last few years, I've probably spent few hundred at AllOfMp3. Why? Because I could buy the music I wanted, not only at the price I wanted, but in the format I wanted.
Does the music industry really think if people didn't want CDs, that they would've switched from cassettes and vinyl? Of course people switched, because they WANTED compact-discs, there was an advantage. Does EMI think that if the masses wanted CDs and they only sold cassettes, that anyone would continue to buy EMI's music? Likely, the masses would just put their money elsewhere. Customers buy what they want, remember: "The customer is always right." As long as the layman wants MP3 files, and the audiophiles want FLAC files, DRM will not sell. If music is only available underneath DRM, then music will not sell.
I only assume that EMI believes that stopping DRM will stop illegal downloads, and the revenue gained by recouping the "losses" of illegal downloads will outweigh the losses that they now incur due to DRM. However, I believe that of those illegally downloading, there are the following groups:
1. People that would purchase the product if there was no DRM, but download illegally instead.
2. People that won't pay regardless.
3. People that use illegal downloads as time-shifted radio, driving sales.
Based on this list, I can only see DRM hurting EMI. Group #2 won't pay regardless, and they're driving away users from groups #1 and #3. Thus, their DRM is only removing a significant number of potential customers. There is NO advantage to EMI to continue pushing DRM.
"... the charge is a tax/levy." Anyone else think it's about time to dress up as Indians or one of the other Village People and start throwing 1's and 0's into the Boston Harbor?
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
Your working on the assumption that everyone is a theif. Your not actually thinking about how people think.I don't pirate music, I even used the Itune Music store when it came out, but after a week I realised that none of the song I had purchased were playable on anything but my PC. I switched to the great WMP's MSN store and playsforsure and started getting flaky playing (believe it or not it would only play sometimes on WMP9 but everytime on my sync'd device.) After two bad expearences I gave up on online music, it wasn't cheaper (we're talking £7.99 an album when I could buy it for £9.97) it gave me less choice and generally put me off. So I went back to my old habits of simply waiting until a album fell from popular interest or looking out for lesser known artists before they were big and getting the albums on the cheap.
The first music store which can offer me music without DRM and actually be cheaper than retail stores (ITMS has been more expensive in some cases) will have my business I like owning legitmate copies of disks most people do, but most people don't like to feel like their being ripped off. When a DVD first comes out it can be as much as £17.99 5 months later that samew dvd is £4.99. Music is much the same, so people pirate.
If filesharering and piracy is so prolific perhaps this suggests that the price of music/films doesn't match the price the demand (consumer) expects to pay. The fact that no music/film company adjusts their pricing to take advantage of this simply screams of price fixing. There will always be some priacy as there is always a blackmarket for any good for any other service, but give consumers the product/service they want at a price they are happy paying (competitiveness always helps here) you'll never stop all piracy its an impossible goal. My idea is based on the principle of "This is how the world works" the nice music companies seem to be working on the principle of "this is how the world should be"
A lot of people don't have an alternative that even LETS them be honest. For example, I listen to a lot of my music on my networked Tivo. Tivo will only play mp3's over the network. It won't play wma's or protected aac files. So, what are my options even if I *WANT* to pay? I can either buy a full CD for one song (and have to go through the hassle of waiting for it to ship and ripping it to boot), go to a site with a VERY limited selection like emusic, or pirate.
If someone is just a cheap-ass who is determined to pirate, nothing is ever going to stop them. But it seems like the studios are stupid to pass up on those honest people who actually WANT to pay, but who just don't want to deal with the hassle and risk of DRM.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.