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Store Says DRM Causes 3 of 4 Support Calls
Carter writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Musicload, one of Europe's largest movie stores, has found that 75% of its customer support problems are caused by DRM. Users have frequent problems using the music that they have purchased, which has led Musicload to try selling independent label music without DRM. Artists choosing to abandon DRM in favor of good old-fashioned MP3 have seen 40% growth in sales since December. Good to see someone in the business both 'gets it' and is willing to do something about it."
Curiously, the article doesn't mention any specific problems. I'm racking my tiny brain right now to think of some problem that isn't desired by the RIAA.
I submit to you the anecdotal evidence of my sister's "iPod." She purchased songs through iTMS and attempted to move the DRM'd files onto her SanDisk MP3 Player. Then she wondered why it didn't work. It didn't work because the files have digital rights management & only brand specific players will play it--and vice versa.
You know, right now iPods are probably the most popular portable music device. But I don't know of any other music download DRM services that they work with. So if some third party download service called Musicload is reporting that 75% of problem calls are DRM related, I'm going to wager that every single call went a little something like "Do you have an iPod?" "No." "I'm sorry, iPod doesn't support our DRM." (or the German equivalent). In fact, on their site, I don't see an iPod as being supported.
I think a DRM standard that everyone adopts would avoid these issues but I don't forsee that happening in the future. It benefits Apple somewhat because they can have a great service or a great player and reap the market. I don't blame them, however, because they do a fine job on both ends. I am concerned about any sort of free market existing here.
In the end, the RIAA wants these problems. They don't want you docking a player with many computers and soaking up the files. They want one player associated with one computer associated with one account and any attempt to anything else should wipe everything off the face of the planet. Why? Money. Somehow the consumer no longer has a voice.
My work here is dung.
This store is taking a realistic look at their support costs, and has determined that a particular "feature" is costing them a lot of money.
Woohoo. Great. Little happy dance. Big fucking deal.
They aren't the ones who are pushing DRM. They ahve it because without it they wouldn't get the major label tracks which (I presume) form the bulk of their income. This isn't hurting the labels who are requiring the DRM, its simply sqishing the middle players. Now, this is certainly better than just squishing the consumer, but it's still a far cry from leverage to affect change where the change can actually occur.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Odd name for a movie store.
Anyway, I've returned a DVD because it wouldn't play on my computer. Not surprisingly, it was due to DRM. If the stores lose money trying to sell it, then they will stop carrying it.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Simply put, the user is too dumb to realize they even have a problem, let alone link it to DRM. Nobody knows what DRM even is, there is no awareness at all. 'nuff said.
As a side note: why don't the famous musicians dump their majors and start selling mp3s independently? I would suppose they'd earn much more.
Global warming is a cube.
And stating this isn't directly the entertainment conglomerates fault. It's a disingenuous game for sure.
I think the Entertainment conglomerates can plausibly claim at the PHB level, "there's no DRM standard and that's not our fault." This way they can maintain chaos and gain total control of the digital distribution channel when they pick a winner.
It also means that whoever is making these DRM schemes has to do a really good job creating code that has _lots_ of error condition controls. Which I just don't see anyone doing.
The end game is the media conglomerates to win unless the copyright law is meaningfully overhauled.
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So when will Apple step up and allow specific artists to go DRM-free too?
Right after Apple allows interoperability between their other products and other manufacturers'.
Leaving aside the idea that different companies, even when owned by the same parent, may have different views, there is no contradiction here at all. For T-Mobile, DRM is making them money. For Musicload, it costs them money. You are thinking in terms of whether DRM itself is bad or good. Businesses don't. All they care about is how DRM affects *their* bottom line.
How is this informative? If you want to succeed in driving online music sales out of existence, which will in turn cause the RIAA to scream even more about piracy, and start slapping even more people with lawsuits, then great.
How about, if you don't like DRM, you don't purchase music from artists & labels which support DRM? Shift that money to indie labels & independent artists that don't use DRM, and suddenly you'll see small labels become much more influential. You can drive a wedge into the recording industry associations by spending your money on labels that do business in a way you agree with; fucking over the resellers and driving them out of business is not the way to reach any desirable end state.
I don't care if Jessica Simpson is offering to personally give you a hummer for every DRM'ed track you buy... if DRM (or more precisely, the lack of it) is important to you, then don't buy it .
T-Mobile not supporting non-DRM'd music may increase support expenses at Musicload, as customers try to buy newly available non-DRM'd music at Musicload and experience problems. A CBA would determine if the support for those customers is cheaper than the increased profits from sales of DRM'd music; if not, then these subsidiaries should figure out a better way to work together.
This is an example of the opposite of syngergy -- we have here two parts whose total value is less than the sum of each part.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This really should be modded insightful instead of funny. It appears to be the actual business plan of a lot of these companies.
Except that the labels will see lower sales (from people buying indie labels/bands) and still scream "piracy is eating our profits!", so there needs to be an added step of not buying DRM'd music and telling the RIAA labels at the same time so they know WHY they lost a sale. Plus it's a non-solution for people who actually like a particular artist. Yes, a lot of mainstream RIAA-label music is pop crap, but some of the artists are worth listening to, so what do you do if you still want music from $ARTIST but still want to vote with your dollars? (leaving out the argument about how this wouldn't then be a boycott, but not everyone wants to do a wholesale boycott) The parent poster's solution was actually not that bad in that respect. You buy the music you want, but make it clear to the distributor, and therefore eventually the label, that you are not pleased with the DRM by harrowing their support with DRM related questions. Then the distributor sees their support costs going up from DRM, and tell the labels that DRM sucks.
The more pessismistic view is that there will always be enough ignorant or indifferent consumers of RIAA music that a personal boycott, even with telling the labels your reasons, will have little effect because of the huge number of consumers who don't care and will buy anyway. It's not enough in this situation to just not buy RIAA music, you have to make it affect their bottom line, and in such a way that they can't ignore/hype it as "economic effects of piracy". Driving up costs that are tied to specific metrics (aka can't be written off to piracy) like tech support is one good way to get the message across. To keep up the boycott aspect for those willing to do so, buy it, pursue support, then return it stating clearly your reasons for doing so.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I am often surprised at how few people realize their DVD player's "problems" are, more often than not, related to Macrovision's content protection. I suppose technically it is an issue with the DVD player, since it's not handling the Macrovision stuff gracefully; but by and large the general public just seems to think that DVD players suck - and they blame the hardware manufacturer rather than the MPAA.
DRM needs to die. Its only real-world impact is to inconvenience those of us who try to do things legally - certainly the pirates aren't being overly inhibited.
#DeleteChrome
Because, in the immortal words of Al Franken, they're lying liars who lie. They're getting called out for their monopolistic behavior in the EU, and they're pointing the finger at someone else while they squeeze another few years of lock-in out of the folks who buy in to the system. DRM will be removed from iTunes when an external force makes it happen, and then Steve Jobs or his replacement will play the saint and parade his "great achievement" all over the news.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Not only are the pirates proceeding full speed, the pirated media is superior to the original and hence more valuable. Examples:
Music -- No DRM, can play anywhere, any number of times, no restrictions.
Movies -- You can copy only the main movie so it starts up immediately without the need to even touch any controls. No menus, no half a dozen previews, no FBI or MPAA warnings. And absolutely nothing, anywhere, that is "unskippable".
Games -- No CD checks. No hunting through your house to find a CD just so you can play an old game that's already fully installed. No losing your purchase because the disk is damaged.
So, the current option offered to people who want to be legit is to buy overpriced stuff that's a pain in the ass to use and isn't as functional as the free pirate versions. What a surprise that so many people opt out of that deal.