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DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble?
digitaldame2 writes "Many opponents of DRM have been overjoyed at recent efforts to free media from its grip. But PC Mag Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff believes the whole world has gone mad. His view is that our digital economy will collapse this way, and it could be followed by countless others. 'The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain. For maybe a year, music companies thought they had the situation under control, but then album sales tumbled. Retailers, musicians, and some music-industry execs thought DRM was the culprit, and they soon joined the chorus of consumers calling for its head. Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble. Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy, yet everyone's cheering.'" Is the removal of restrictions from our media really that big a deal?
It's not just DRM, although that's certainly a large part. Copyright extension and rigorous enforcement cause trouble, too.
Indeed, were it not for that, I could quote the lyrics of "Trouble in River City" from Music Man to make my point, provide a link to the MP3 (or Ogg) and maybe someone would download the song and decide to go buy the CD, or even the DVD.
I'm just a dreamer...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Once, there were horses, and they were the only way to get around town. All the horse-maintainers, the shodders and such, were in business and there was a grand economy.
..
Then, some new technology came to the scene: the automobile. "Oh noes", the shodders cried, "our economy is going to be ruined.."
The moral of this story is: technology. It will force change. Either keep up with it, or remove yourself from the market. Music doesn't have to be paid for - not any more, and no longer will we have to worship the few and provide them economic sustenance, so that they are only able to do it, when the many can do it, themselves.
In short, grow up music-industry people. Your world is changing. All worlds change. Let the people decide what life will be, and quite crying just because you didn't see the writing on the wall.
Yes, this applies to all media/content related markets. The writing is on the wall. The only way to protect your media is to put it in hardware - books are a good example - that makes it pleasant for people to buy it from you. The world needs us all to go digital and stop raping the earth, just so the few can profit from the ignorance of the many. Let the horses back to the fields
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I had an MP3 once on my computer. My computer started to crash/reboot continuously and my dog started to howl. The dog howling caused me sleepness nights. My sleepy-ness caused me to have a car accident with a bus full of nuns. The surviving nuns sued me and the dead nuns are waiting for me in heaven with baseball bats. Because of the lawsuit, I lost my home, my computer, AND my dog... I'm living in the streets and I only go into public libraries to use the washrooms and post on slashdot. I am scared of MP3s. (but not frightened to death because then the nuns & bats will get me)
No kidding. Maybe, just maybe, the model of having companies make money from the distribution of music is not going to last. But then what happens? Musicians go back to the pre-phonograph days of making a living by performing live. Seems to me people listen to music, dig their bands and then go see them when they come to town, buying the accompanying tour merchandise and stuff. Sure, that leaves the music labels out in the cold. But is it any different of a change in the larger economy than when we switched from horse-drawn vehicles to gasoline-powered ones?
Without DRM, digital music can eaily be played on almost any media player. You now have opened up media rather then just iPods, to generic MP3 players, Windows systems, Linux systems, OS X systems, FreeBSD systems, and more. That is something that hasn't happened yet is a standard non-patented format for storing music, OGG would be likely but with it not being native on most MP3 players and Windows (and OS X too?) and MP3 is patent restricted and therefore rarely playable (legally) on Linux, FreeBSD and other systems. MP3 players also suffer with the patent fee, they could be cheaper without it. All DRM does is make people not want to download "legal" media, the main pro of "piracy" was that you can download it in just about any format you wanted, for free and it would easily work with just about every device that you had while the "legal" ones would not. Digital music will never catch up to CDs if "piracy" is always the better option. I am not advocating suing anyone but seriously, when you iTunes downloads work with you iPod/iTunes and nothing else, the MP3 download from a tracker site is a better deal as it will work on that $25 MP3 player you got, your computer (any OS) along with your iPod and phone, ETC. It isn't just DRM that was killing digital music it was the lack of a standard format. In the CD age (before the Sony rootkits and the like) your CD would work in any computer with a CD drive, any CD player be it the $25 off brand one or your $2000 stereo system. When we get that, digital music will begin selling otherwise, who wants expensive media that works with 1 brand of products and nothing else.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
This idiot fails to realize that labels have been selling DRM free music for the last 20 years. It's called a CD. Funny how the "digital economy" hasn't collapsed yet.
No, were it not for that, you could quote the lyrics of "Trouble in River City" from Music Man to make your point, provide a link to the audio file, and maybe someone would download the song...and the rest of that artist's oeuvre. At least if it goes as far as it sounds like you want it to. That doesn't make money for anyone, although it does give us plenty of free music.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I do kind of feel bad for the *AA member companies. It would suck to realize that your industry was subject to a disruptive technology that was already well past the tipping point. Having said that, it's their problem and not mine. I've been buying DRM-free music for decades and have absolutely zero interest in giving up control of my possessions.
Did you hear that? Possessions. Not licensed content, not rentals or leases, but things I own. When I buy music, I own that copy no matter how much they wrongly insist otherwise. I will not pay extra to buy restrictions to prevent me from using my possessions they way I want to use them, even if that was is undesirable for its makers. As long as I'm staying within the constraints of the law and not giving copies of it to others, it's none of their business (even if they wish it was).
So sorry, *AA. You had the opportunity to do things differently, but you chose to fight me instead of making me your friend. Your actions have been so scummy that I truly don't care what happens to you now. Justice? Morals? Ethics? As you have long cast those aside, I just can't be bothered to care when people fail to use them with you. Goodbye and good luck. You won't be missed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Copyright in it's original form already does that: "gives us lots of free music".
The only question is the timeframe and whether or not you are going to annoy your paying customers in the meantime.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Exactly.
Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy
They also aren't the same thing, as anyone even remotely familiar with the subject is well aware.
What isn't rational in a market economy is deliberately making the black market version of your product better than the above board original, by artificially crippling the latter. Such a policy is pretty much directly targeted at the very people who actively support your business, while doing little to impair those who do not.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... either way the music industry needs to revise their business model, and removing DRM is the first step. Remember, there are TWO industries at work here. There is the music industry, made up of writers, musicians, singers, producers, etc.Then there is the recording industry. The recording industry is responsible for pressing CDs and putting them on store shelves.
The recording industry might need a new business model, or it might need to join the buggy whip makers and telegraph operators and just fade into yesteryear. The music industry people never really made much money from CD sales, since the record industry kept the screws so tight with everybody. Performers make their money from concerts (when they don't get screwed by promoters) and merchandise sales, anyway.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
And, DRM free music doesn't mean that it's being given away for free. It just means that once bought, people can listen to THEIR music freely. Removing DRM from music essentially makes it more valuable (which is why iTunes decided to charge more for it than music with DRM) and will improve profits of music without DRM.
The question waiting to be answered is whether or not DRM free music will encourage/facilitate more "illegal" file sharing. My guess is that the affect will be minimal and the appreciation towards the music industry for not tying up purchased music will only increase online sales.
I for one will never buy music with DRM.
Excuse me? I think possibly one of the main PROBLEMS with lowered music quality is the fact that so many groups/bands today cannot tour...cannot play their own instruments with any acuity, and require too much electronic 'help'. Geez, people are paying money for acts that do tour...to watch them dance and lip-sync?!?!
Why can't groups learn to cultivate talent, take it on the road...I'll give Led Zeppelin as an example. They had most of their material for the 1st album ready to go FROM rehearsals, and playing the songs on the road. They recorded their album on their own dollar (Jimmy Page and Peter Grants) because they hadn't even signed with Atlantic records yet.
And what did they do? They toured....and toured...and toured. They did something like 3-4 tours of the US AND about the same of Europe in their first year out....hell, Led Zeppelin II was pretty much written and recorded while on the road that first year.
Those guys could play....and they did. They were well known to give 3 hour concerts. Back in their day, they tried to make sure that ticket prices were reasonable. They made sure to try to give the audience what it deserved. From this live presentation....they sold albums, which helped fuel energy for more live shows.
And look at Zeppelin...they refused to sell singles....although a few came out by the record companies against their will. They made FEW TV appearances...yet, they sold records, and set attendance records.
I'd have to say....being talented and able to perform live DID have a lot to do with their fame and fortune. I'd like to think it could be replicated for upcoming bands.
I know there are differences now that make it tougher....music genre's are so splintered now....rather than just 'rock', there are upteen different variations. Radio is consolidated more....etc. But, I have to think if a group was really GOOD, and good live...with music distribution, they could take it on the road and get famous. Where is the next Zeppelin?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It doesn't matter if there is DRM or not. The music will be "freed" anyway. As has been said MANY MANY times on /. before, DRM cannot work unless both the player and the media are involved and the player is "unhackable" (I use unhackable in "'s because so far, every DRM has been cracked [except BD+] but if you take the xbox360, it is VERY close to being hackproof. Aside from the DVD firmware hack and the two vulnerable BIOSes, it has proved to be hack proof. I can see the next generation of games consoles having the dvd firmware signed too.)
The reason that DRM is breakable today is because computers are not owned by the content distributors (yet). If said content can be played on a computer, then it can be "freed" by that same computer. If you can play it, somewhere you have an uncompressed, unencrypted stream, that should be able to be exploited.
Computers, however are being "owned" more and more by "Big Content". Vista's DRM integration, Protected pathways is a prime example of this. How long before noone owns a comptuer anymore and all the computers are leased from a few companies that basically turn your computer into an overpriced [HD]DVD player that plays games and runs Word, in contrast to the current "open" nature of current computers.
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Copyright in it's original form already does that: "gives us lots of free music". The only question is the timeframe and whether or not you are going to annoy your paying customers in the meantime.
Amen. And when that term is several human lifetimes, it is clearly benefiting only one entity: the corporations. The rest of you suckers don't get a look in.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Prior to the commercialisation of the recording industry (which began in the 1910s/20s but only really took off after WW2) the only way the common person understood music was in the context of someone, usually THEMSELF, playing it. On an instrument. That wasn't plugged into an amplifier.
And at the time, there were musicians, and some did very well (Salieri wasn't poor, nor was Handel) but even they had a tiny tiny fraction of the kind of wealth exhibited by the ruling classes at the time. Musicians were still, basically, hired hands. They might be rich hired hands, but not like what we know today. The important point is the context: you knew music as a performance, not as a recording.
Due to the exigencies of technology, music became a commodity, and in classic capitalist fashion, the material costs were reduced to a minimum - finally, they evapourated as data into the interweb thingie. So, now they're trying to put a meter on something that the interwebs have always had a complex and contradictory relationship: data itself. The record companies are not in the business of selling music. They sell CDs. If the CDs had recordings of dogs barking, or were flat out silent, it wouldn't matter to the record companies, as they (in theory) sell what people want.
What people want is music. What people want is something for nothing. What people want is to wish upon a star and get everything they ever dreamed of, and if they can't do that, then they want the music that takes them there....
The music biz started with printing sheet music in the 19th century. It will die trying to sell data. It was an interesting ride. But now the amusement park is closed. Time to go home and make your own music.
Give up on the star system. Make your own, and support the art made by your friends, your family and your neighbours. Give up on this hallucination of Commodity Culture. Learn to play an instrument, and learn to play it well. work with other musicians, and through your own competence and intelligence you will create the hope this world so desperately needs.
and, in the process, go piss on the grave of the music business.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It's simple, really: We need a megalithic music industry because without it, the demand for cocaine would plummet. This would cause organized crime families to need to find another way to make money, which would most likely be kidnapping and harvesting organs from innocent children for sale on the black market. For goodness sake, won't somebody think of the children?!
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Sort of.
A very shallow view of the situation would lead us to think that no one would make any money off the music. But...
If some of the people that read that post and listened to the music showed it to a few of their friends...
Then if a few of them wanted to see the movie...
Then if the artist put up a paypal link...
Profit.
It's riskier. The music has to be better. It puts the control in the hands of the consumer rather than the producer. There is little need for behemoth middle-men like music labels.
I see these all as good things.
It has been demonstrated that talented artists can make a living doing what they love without DRM. What has not been demonstrated is that labels can survive that way.
I'm ok with a world like that.
PS. "The Music Man" is a particularly apt example of the problem and essentially nullifies your point. Almost the entire cast, crew, and musicians involved in it's creation are dead. The only people making money off of it are distributors that made no artistic contribution to it's creation.
One thing I noticed in TFA is that he immediately jumps from DRM-free music to giving away all music for free, which I don't think is necessarily inevitable.
Think about this...it's been something like 7-8 years since the original Napster appeared. What if, instead of the ensuing stonewalling and lawsuits and legislative attmepts to roll back technology, the recording industry had simply created easy-to-use and DRM-free pay-for-download sites? What if they had spent their efforts and resources creating a new music distribution model that served the customers instead of reactionary tactics that had earned them nothing but bad will from consumers? Would they still lose out on sales to piracy via DRM-free media copying? Certainly. But perhaps, had they not destroyed whatever shreds of consumer good will they had, and could honestly say "Look, we gave you, the consumers, the most convenient music distribution system you've ever seen, so we ask you on the honor system not to redistribute our content or swap it with others for free", they might not be facing a customer base that largely considers them scum and would just as soon see them cut out of the picture altogether.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe everyone will freeload forever without DRM...but I can't help but think that since 8+ years since "mp3" entered the lexicon that piracy is *still* the most convenient form of digital content distribution, that perhaps the only reason why everything that they do "just digs them deeper" is that they have quite simply fully and completely alienated their customer base.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
And why is this a surprise? They can sell a couple of hundred tickets at a tenner each at a folk club once a year, times perhaps twenty or thirty dates. Most folk clubs are run on a shoestring, and an artist will get a substantial proportion of the door, but let's say it's only fifty percent. Twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year isn't a king's ransom, but it's a living wage, as their expenses are minimal. Throw in some CD sales, perhaps the odd song on a bigger artist's album (one of the guys I'm thinking of does session work for Nanci Griffith and has had a song of his on one of her albums), the occasional small festival: it's a living. They won't get rich, but they didn't ten or twenty years ago, and their ability to email their fans for free means they can sell tickets far more easily than twenty years ago, too.
Artists like this were always reliant on this model, and never sold records in quantity (you couldn't get them in shops), so it's hard to see how their position has changed. Artists who couldn't sell a few hundred tickets times twenty dates weren't selling records either, and for them it was strictly a hobby.
At the big end, someone like Springsteen doesn't give a stuff about record sales. Yes, he reputedly splits the take evenly with his band, but they're grossing something like three million pounds a night in stadiums, and can tour in those for months on end. Say they only get 33% of the gross, so a million a night split ten ways is a hundred thousand pounds. Times a sixty date tour. That's not poverty if they never saw another penny from record sales.
Thirty years ago, musicians toured to support record sales. Now records support tour sales. Markets change. They could always get a job in a shop if they don't like the lifestyle.
ian
THE Music Industry is a myth
And by that I mean The Myth is that the is one "music industry". Specifically, what I mean when I say "the music industry" is (clearly, obviously) NOT the same thing that THEY (RIAA, etc) of the world mean.
I would suggest that we (the sane and clear thinking intelligent people of the world) understand that there are TWO "Music Industries".
- The Industry of Making Music
- The Industry of Distributing Music
DRM is all about the control of the distribution of music. What we're seeing here is a failure of that control.So what if DRM fails? So what if Music Distribution fails? So what if The Music Distribution Industry (which, basically, in its current invocation is nothing more than a protectionist racket like the MAFIA used to run) fails?
Previously the mechanical complexities involved in the distribution of physical media meant there "was room" (in a business sense) for an entity to "make this happen smoothly" and make money in the process. Now that there's less and less physical distribution, and more electronic distribution, the previous "margin for profit" is rapidly shrinking (ie there's no room for someone to skip BILLIONS of dollars from consumers for no reason).
As living proof that any idiot can make predictions about The Music Industry
- Music Distribution will be SIGNIFICANTLY LESS about physical media and more about content
- Many artists will find this is an opportunity to be more direct with their customers, and thereby collect more of the profits themselves
- Other distributors will be needed, to help shuffle bits (iTunes, Last.FM, etc)
- There will be multiple distribution models (sell bits, rent bits, subscription for bits)
- There will be MUCH MORE of a market for "free stuff" that comes with what you bought (ie "value add")
- There will be MUCH MORE of a market for premium content (ie the ultimate collectors signed-by-the-artist, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted pack)
... because it's now a significant distinguisher, as more of the market is no-longer physical - ....
- Profit???
Basically I could ramble on for a few MEGABYTES, but the main point is this:- The Entire Industry That Revolves Around Music will be much broader, deeper, richer than ever before.
Even though "the current distribution and control models" are no longer valid, nor necessary, nor are they even WANTED anymore.We need not, we should not, mourn their demise. Like a recently deceased aged relative, we've had some good memories, but towards the end it's just been messy and embarrassing.
Hold a funeral, bury the body, enjoy the wake, celebrate the new generation.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
That's ridiculous. There will be (or rather is, as DRM-free music is now mainstream) no increase in piracy. Piracy requires that only one DRM-free copy gets out for it to proliferate across the internet. And guess what: every song released by the big-5 labels has been released on CD--without DRM.
DRM is not about piracy and never was. That is how to labels and move studios chose to sell it to the public (artists are going to starve in a digital world without DRM!), but it actually provides no protection against piracy. It may be difficult for someone to get unencrypted data off an HD-DVD disk, but that doesn't matter. As long as one person can do it, the data will proliferate. In other words, if DRM were about piracy in order to be effective it wouldn't have to be merely difficult to break, it would have to be impossible.
But that's not why the content producers have pushed DRM so hard. What it's really about is control. Consumers have traditionally had a great deal of control over their media, but in this digital age the content producers perceived that they could shift the balance back towards themselves, opening up new revenue streams even as they watched their markets fall. After all, if consumers had control over their media, they could put it on any player they wanted, without paying any more money for their content. That won't do. Look at the nice racket they have: do you want to play your iTunes music on linux (or, more commonly, on a non-Apple mp3 player)? Pay more money for the same content in a different form. Want to play your DVDs on your iPod? You have to re-buy it.
Faced with declining interest in their products (a smaller market), there is only two ways to increase their revenue: get more people to buy their content, or get the people that do to pay more money. DRM lets the content producers take the second approach.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.