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Warner Music Group Drops DRM for Amazon
SirLurksAlot sends us to Ars Technica for an article about the Warner Music Group's decision to allow DRM-free music downloads through Amazon. This reversal of Warner's former position has been underway for some time, and it boosts the number of DRM-free songs available from Amazon to 2.9 million. Quoting:
"Warner's announcement says nothing about offering its content through other services such as iTunes, and represents the music industry's attempt to make life a bit more difficult for Apple after all the years in which the company held the keys to music's digital kingdom.
I've downloaded several albums and I'm very happy with it. Odd mix of bit rates (some are about 224 kbit VBR, others are 256 kbit fixed rate), but no complaints with the music. I just wish their library was larger.
Only real complaint is that the album downloader (that allows you to get the album discount) only runs on Windows & MacOS. Write a Java client and get with the program, Amazon!
This isn't about record companies deciding DRM is bad. It is about making sure Apple doesn't control the distribution of digital media.
As DRM dies the fools will start using digital watermarking to sue people who leak to p2p networks. This will ruin numerous lives until some clever lawyer points out that since the distributor knows the watermark THEY can upload it to p2p networks in order to frame people they wish to sue. Eventually this fact will sink in among judges, but before that happens thousands of people will have been burnt, new draconian legislation will have been passed, and music sales will have fallen even more.
Following this the process of suing based on watermarks will wane, but the distributors will instead disconnect people from their websites if they find their watermarks on p2p. The result will be that those burnt ( weather guilty or not ) will migrate to filesharing.
In essence, despite the obvious fiasco that is DRM the same garbage will continue due to greed and stupidity. Really, DRM in one clothing or another has been arround for some time, it as never been successful, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. It will continue this way for quite some time still.
I find iTunes' browsing interface to be very nice and the simple search to be faster and easier than every other music store I've tried. As for DRM, try QTFairUse - it very quickly strips DRM from protected tracks. It scans your iTunes library for protected tracks, backs them up, decodes them, and replaces them in your library and all playlists with the unprotected ones. 10-20 seconds per track and it's lossless. It also transfers the ID3 info to the new tracks, as well as album artwork. Of course there's already a lot of tracks in iTunes Plus (DRM-free mp3) which saves you the small trouble.
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Oops... I guess i should put a link for those who haven't heard of it:
QTFairUse download & discussion
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It seems to be that the music industry is pulling a "new coke" method of marketing: come out with a new product that sucks (DRM-laden "music"), and then all reap the rewards when they revert back to the original (real and liberated music). This will make everyone feel like they're "sticking it to the man" by purchasing this new flavor, when in fact the industry is in fact reverting back to the old tried-and-true method.
/do/ with this music that is being sold to me without expressed limitation. Do I now have my fair-use rights back because I don't have to violate the DMCA by breaking copy protection? Or is breaking copy protection now back within my right because the industry is trashing DRM in general?
This begs the question: what exactly can I
Somehow, I fear, the consumer is still going to end up losing in the end.
-d
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
There's one reason we're seeing DRM-free music: Apple.
Every internet whiner and hazmat-suited protester put together didn't make a noticeable fraction of the impact against DRM that Apple did via their refusal to buy into Microsoft's DRM or license their own to others. They turned the labels tools to control customers into a distributor's tool to control the labels, and now the labels are caught in their own trap, and desperately thrashing and gnawing at their limbs to get away (by selling DRM-free to everyone but Apple).
But, since Apple haven't had the industry-crushing success they had with music in the video market thus far, and no one else looks likely to repeat Apple's feat, we may be stuck with DRM in the video market for a while.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The first/last time I tried to purchase an online album from Amazon (just last week) I was informed that the service is only available within the US. So altho Warner may have recognized the "anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe" it seems that the DRM-free zone has distinct limitations.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Programs like QTFairUse are excellent, but they are no substitute for actually buying only DRM free music in the first place, and refusing to buy DRM encumbered tracks, period. Nothing sends a message to the music industry better.
In other words, being able to break DRM (today) is no reason to buy DRM encumbered music.
Could it be that this is the result of Amazon's decision to simply stop selling music altogether?
(For those that didn't notice: About a week before Christmas, you couldn't buy any music from certain distributors at Amazon for a few days in some EU countries. They wanted Amazon to take the (as the music industry calls it) "legal" distribution ways instead of buying their CDs in areas where the record industry sells them for a penny per dozen to have any sales at all. Amazon complied and pulled the cheap records. And every other record from those studios. One week before spendmas. They also announced that "the talks are not over yet", so... is this what came out of those talks?).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> It's certainly not the outbreak of common sense this will undoubtedly being tagged as. It's simply that
> they saw their sales hurt more by pushing DRM rather than dealing with the "loss" of "only" selling us
> music once.
No, I don't think that is the reason at all. In the end they would probably have won on the take it or leave it tactics with DRM. Most people were lining up, buying iPods and giving each other iTunes gift certificates like good little consumers. No, what did it was fear and greed. Fear among the music cartels that Apple and Microsoft were about to become a duopoly and control all access to media... i.e. replace the music (and eventually movie distributors) companies as the gatekeepers. Really, once they were distributing most music it would have been a totally natural step to start signing up artists directly.... Apple already IS doing that with indy acts. So fear of being cut ALL the way out was motivating them to find a way to create enough retailers in the digital download space to avoid being marginalized.
Now consider the greed and fear at Amazon, Walmart etc. They could read the same tea leaves. Walmart with it's huge iPod display and shrinking sales in their CD dept and the uneasy reality that the Walmart online music store will NEVER be compatible with the Apple or Zune DRM scheme. I.E. every ipod or Zune sale is helping Apple and Microsoft dismantle Walmart's current huge percentage of nationwide music sales. Ditto for Amazon, selling the crap out of iPods, each one sold eating away at future content sales unless they found a way to 'kick the table over' and change the rules of the game.
Odds of convincing either His Steveness or the Borg to open up their DRM system being zero, even with the full unified might (yea, as if) of all of the media megacorps, the only way out of the hole they had dug themselves after considering the file compatibility matrix of the huge installed base of players was unencumbered mp3.
Democrat delenda est