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EMI Says ITMS DRM-Free Music Selling Well
An anonymous reader writes "'The initial results of DRM-free music are good' says Lauren Berkowitz, a senior vice president of EMI, at a music industry conference in New York. Berkowitz went on to say that the early results from iTunes indicate that DRM-free offerings may boost revenue from digital albums as well as individual songs."
Well if they are willing to go drm-free, how about a site
to buy their 'tunes if you are NOT running M$.
We need an itunes for Linux.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
This first step, is a baby step...a good one but, a small one. Sell me online what I can buy in a store (quality) without DRM, and then, you've got it right. I'll be buying pretty much all my music online.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The more significant figures would be whether the amount of EMI music being passed on peer to peer services has changed. I highly doubt it has increased more than its usual variance (it may even have decreased), and I hope the other RIAA companies notice this. I'm of the opinion that there's roughly a fixed number of people who would pirate regardless, and distributing music without DRM won't change this. However making music harder to listen due to DRM might actually drive piracy numbers up.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Somehow, I think EMI knew that selling DRM-free tracks would make a profit all along.
1. Release DRM-laden, horrific quality tracks
2. Watch consumers buy tracks
3. Wait for consumers to grow angry and realize the restrictions placed on their media
4. Release DRM-free, slightly better tracks
5. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks
6. ???
7. Profit!!
THEN the second round
8. Release slightly better quality tracks...
9. Wait for the consumers to REBUY or 'upgrade' all their tracks...
How is watermarking the files DRM? It doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want to with the file. Now, if you do something illegal with the file, like distribute it on a P2P network, then this could help them track you down. Unless you are saying the only reason you are against DRM is it prevents you from breaking the law.
Whatever encoding e-mail addresses should be called, DRM it is not. It doesn't limit you in any way.
Let's not confuse the meaning of terms like this, that's not helpful.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
That's because everything else is bullshit. If you don't care enough to alter your spending habits, then you don't care.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Give me a way to do my work once, doesn't matter what it is, and live from it until I'm dead, and I'll think it's fair for musicians to have the same privilege. Otherwise, forget it. It's simply fair that they work everyday, as everyone else does, by doing whatever they're good at, as everyone else also does. Copyright is at best illogical, at worst an aberration.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
You really think you can tell the difference between CD-quality and 256kbps AAC? Doubtful. I call BS. And even if you can tell the difference, and the difference is obvious enough to you that you care, you're one in a billion. For pretty much everyone, 256kbps is near enough to lossless that you could treat it as lossless (even transcode it to another format) and never be able to tell the difference.
And for that miniscule nearly-undetectable drop in quality, you're cutting your download time, increasing the amount of songs you can hold on your mp3 player, and maybe even increasing battery time.
> The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks
No! They allow you to prove precisely one thing, and that is the tracks contain a completable editable and non-authoratative item of metadata that describes certain data about you. They don't prove who owns the tracks, who bought the tracks, where the tracks have been, who's done what with them - they're a post-it note on a car saying "Dave bought this car". Anyone can put on a new post-it note saying something different, or remove the post-it note altogether.
The amount of FUD on this topic has been unbelievable.
Not true.
Copying CDs has been pretty easy for a long time now... but musicians haven't starved.
Copying copyrighted music has always been illegal... the DMCA didn't make it "more illegal" or whatever.
Some (I would argue most) people really do like to follow the law, even when it's easy not too... those people will always continue to buy the music they want to hear. Not too mention that some of us feel _good_ about buying cds because we like to support artists that we enjoy (even if most of the money doesn't go to them, more cds sold = good chance of another from the same artist).
Really... assuming that everyone in the US (or world) would break the law and not give any compensation for any entertainment they enjoy is just foolish. I think the RIAA and MPAA forget this sometimes... that 99% of people in the world are actually good people who like to do the right thing.
Friedmud
I wish apple would offer this option to indie musicians (like me), I'd sign up for straight away.
(strictly speaking they'd have to offer it to the the aggregators like tunecore that people like me use)
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
It only provides a [potential] trail of culpability.
It may be "watermarking" or not, but the Wikipedia article seems to think so, as quoted here:
"Another application is to protect digital media by fingerprinting each copy with the purchaser's information. If the purchaser makes illegitimate copies, these will contain his name. Fingerprints are an extension to watermarking principle and can be both visible and invisible."
As for whether it's DRM or not, IMHO, it IS. Whose benefit is the "trail of culpability" for? The customer, or the RIAA? Once again, IMHO, any technology that embeds information which ONLY benefits the recording industry should be considered DRM.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I agree with you Dominic that 256 kbps AAC may sound fine. But what if you want to play it on a device that doesn't support AAC? If you re-encode a lossy format it may not sound so good anymore. I rip my cds to FLAC so that I have a choice later in what format I want to listen to the music in. A simple shell script is all that is needed to convert a directory full of flac files to MP3 or Ogg. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap, but rebuying music in another format is not.
This is the single biggest, highest profile way we can get the message to the industry that DRM doesn't pay.
So please, find a Mac or Windows box if you have to, but go buy something from the iTunes music store. Even if it's just one album and you then shunt the AAC files back to Linux to listen to.
Personally, I recommend something from the Mute back-catalog.
(And yes, I've bought 2 albums so far, I plan to keep buying preferentially from iTMS at least until the other labels get the message.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
> For example, you can mark a gif file by inserting information in unused portions of the color table and leaving the image data > completely untouched. Is this a watermark by pour definition? Or is it one only if used color entries or pixel entries are altered? > Or is it a watermark of the container, but not the data (even though it is potential data...)?
The defining feature of a digital watermark is that it cannot be removed given only the watermarked data. That is its point. A digital photograph emblazoned with a watermark cannot readily be transformed into the original. A digital video file with an invisible-to-the-human-eye-digiatl-watermark inserted to allow the owners of the video's copyright to see who has leaked a copy if it to p2p is useful only because the altered bits cannot be reset to their original state.
So you see, the idea of calling this a watermark isn't just fudging the concept slightly. It's nonsense. It is completely trivial to remove the identifying information, so it is innapropriate to call it a watermark because it neither performs the function nor attempts to perform the function of a watermark.
Because it means they can charge 'extra' for the new-improved version.
It costs them nothing more to produce.
They can charge extra because it is different. Who ever said that retail price was based on the cost to produce? A $20 widget doesn't cost $10 more to produce than a $10 widget with fewer features.
By now introducing DRM-less tracks, EMI have now made an extra £18 by providing something I should have got in the first place.
EMI doesn't make any more money unless you choose to buy. Why did you buy it in the first place if you "should have" gotten something more?
If they add another 'upgrade' to 320kbps quality audio [...]
They could charge whatever they want, but that doesn't mean anyone has to pay it. Why is that hard to comprehend?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
And obfuscating it further will help what exactly? /not/ a watermark.
I agree with the grandparent that tag info is
If it is, is including your email in the filename a watermark too? Is placing a (separate) file with your email on a CD with aac files a watermark? Is just printing your name on the CD? Is printing it on a jewel case? All we're doing is playing around (deliberately to the absurd in my example) with what we consider the black box we wish to consider "the content in question". Is it the jewelcase and all that is inside? Is it the CD? The iso? Directory? file? aac stream?
Is the meaning of "watermarking" a function of how dumb consumers are, thus incapable of grokking what lays beneath the file layer? The answer, in case you haven't figured out, is NO.
It's a slippery slope you're jumping on, and there's nothing but useless terms too meaningless to be of any use at the bottom. Just drags us one step closer to an idiocracy.
I don't see why we need to dumb our language down to the lowest common denominator. It may be you prefer to do things in the US, I think it's outright idiocy. Do we need to start giving "detergent" or "carbon" a new meaning because the average person is clueless in chemistry? No. You either talk the talk or accept the definitions of people who do.
Watermarking refers to embedding data in the media data. Appended stuff that is meaningless in the context of the data is just that. Appended stuff. Think back to where watermarking came from - marking paper. Would scribbling a note (on the same piece of paper, at the bottom) with your name on it constitute a watermark? No. The "water" in "watermark" has a reason for being there - to lay the extra data *on top* of the existing document.
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But to vote with your wallet, you need someone to know what you're voting for. Have you ever wondered how sales predictions are made up? It's a wild assed guess. So if album A is released with DRM and flops and album B without DRM and is a chartbuster, it might have something to do with DRM. Or a million other things. Never mind the "not voting". This isn't the national election, they've no idea how many considered the album in the first place so you not buying go into a huge black box of "people that didn't buy our album".
This is one of the rare opportunities to say that yes, we prefer DRM-free music over the DRM music with very few other variables interfering. I'm much more inclined to "protest" when I know it gets heard. In fact, I think I've bought most of the music on iTunes Plus I consider good by now. Quite frankly, it's more fun protesting by spending money instead of missing out on stuff too. So far: iTunes Plus - iTunes: 203-0 (about 15 tracks, the rest albums). I hope Apple shares that info with the other big labels, let them know what they're missing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings