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.'"

Comments

How does it cost more money to go non-DRM?

[garcia]

$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.

Re:How does it cost more money to go non-DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

The extra charge is because they automatically assume that if you purchase it, you'll commit copyright infringement; the charge is a tax/levy.

Re:How does it cost more money to go non-DRM?

[flaming error]

It doesn't cost more. EMI is just doing it's best to live up to it's name - Electro Magnetic Interference.

dashes

[Skadet]

EMI &mdash Ditching DRM is Going To Cost You

As are en dashes and semicolons ;)

DRM costs to much already.

[crazyjeremy]

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?

Re:DRM costs to much already.

[ThatsNotFunny]

You've got a wife, that in and of itself will cost you plenty.

Re:DRM costs to much already.

[danpsmith]

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?

Exactly. And if the prices were sane, I would definitely buy DRM-Free MP3s. Definitely. But they'd have to be DRM free. I'm not buying .wmas and putting them with the rest of my collection, it's just not happening.

I think what companies don't yet realize is that, look, we already have collections of MP3s. Everyone under 30 probably has a large collection, and I'm one of the few that has a HUGE collection. However, there are times when I want an album and you can't find it on bittorrent and it's not available other than going to the CD store. Honestly, I don't feel like ripping CDs, and there's a lot of times when I just don't even buy the track rather than having to go and buy a CD and rip it to my hard drive. And it has NOTHING to do with cost. It did, at one point when I was a college student money was an issue. Nowadays, it definitely isn't. But when you have a large collection of high quality MP3s that you know will work on your player, in your DVD player, or any number of other devices you simply aren't going to buy a track and break the DRM to have it mesh well with the rest of your collection.

Yes, I'm notorious for downloading a lot of MP3s, but I would be willing to buy legitimate, if only companies would give me the chance to do so. Stop trying to change how we store our music and just mix with what we have. It's the only way you'll survive.

Yours truly,

A kind of average downloader.

Not mdash!

[Virak]

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.

I have a similar situation.

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Wait, come back! Okay, you win. I am willing to adapt my business model to suit what the people want. Therefore, I have decided to remove excrement from my TurdShakes(TM) entirely, possibly replacing it with chocolate or ice cream or some other such boring shake ingredient. You'd like one now, wouldn't you? A regular shake? No Turd(TM)?

Well, that's just what you'll get, then. A delicious normal shake... That is, of course, provided you give me a large bag of moneys first. A really big bag, with lots of moneys. Otherwise, you'll just have to go on buying the original TurdShakes(TM), with heady flavors of... wait, where are you going? Come back!!

It's the smei-colon's fault

[wiredog]

Once she left him for that fancy nbsp, it was all over.

Re:Not Surprising

[moore.dustin]

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.

People will do it

[Mateo_LeFou]

We are going DRM-less in droves. EMI and friends can go with us or not.

Re:People will do it

[elrous0]

Yeah, I think that's what EMI is missing. We ARE going DRM-free. People are sick of DRM and it has reached a tipping point. The only decision they have to make at this point is whether they want us to pay them $.99 a song or $.00 a song.

-Eric

Question / Answer

[ACAx1985]

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

Capitalism at work

[Dracos]

EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.

That should tell EMI that their extortion price is not "what the market will bear".

good news for allofmp3.com

[fyoder]

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.

Par for the course

[glenstar]

As someone who has intimate knowledge of how the entire licensing thing goes between the majors and a digital music provider let me just say that this is in no way shocking. The labels will take as large an advance as they possibly can and it is really a matter of whose legal counsel is better. A couple of years ago there was no way you could license all of the (available) major label content for under 500k... unless you paid one of the better known music industry lawyers a couple hundred K. There are only a half-dozen big shot lawyers in the music biz and they tend to play both sides of the field... and charge whatever the hell they feel like.

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!".