Sony BMG Dropping DRM

Lally Singh writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG is planning on dropping DRM from their music. Salon's Machinest had an interesting take on this; 'Actually, what's happened is quite ironic. It was the industry's own DRM mandates that tied many music-lovers in to Apple's music storefront (we all had iPods, and the only way to buy digital music for the iPod was from Apple). Now Apple's become too powerful for the labels. They need an alternative distribution channel — they want to get music to our iPods, but they don't want to go through Apple to do it. The only way to do that is to offer retailers like Amazon the chance to sell songs as plain, unrestricted MP3s, which are iPoddable.'"

Comments

Re:That crackling sound you hear..

[greg1104]

The change of heart only happening after Christmas may have been because the holiday sales of CDs this year sucked, down 20%.

An interesting artifact from the fossil record

[earlymon]

From http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft's Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony's Connect store will only play on Sony's players; and music purchased from Apple's iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices. and also

Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly. That's from 11 months ago - so please, no sympathy for Sony's actions in this.

Mistake..weakening itunes

[Danathar]

Everybody talks as if Apple dies or thrives on Itunes sales.

WRONG!

Most analysts agree and Apple has all but confirmed they make almost NO money on the itunes store. Rather it's just a vehicle to sell more hardware (ipods, iphones, isomethings). Geeks like devices that have lots of options, and we like to crap on the ipod due lack of this or that feature. Normal non-geeks have been buying the ipod and associated devices due to other reasons other than for the the online itunes store. The idea if itunes goes away the ipod will vanish into oblivion is crazy. If Amazon gets bigger than itunes and Apple can still make a player that sells better than the others it's a win-win situation for them.