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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."
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.........
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.