Music Companies Mull Ditching DRM

PoliTech writes to mention an International Herald Tribue article that is reporting the unthinkable: Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their mp3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without 'rights management' technologies attached. The article notes that this is a step the recording industry vowed 'never to take'. From the article: "Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place."

Re:Undermining Apple?

[vought]

Digital music sales are flagging? Looks to me like they're still growing.

What the linked article doesn't tell you is that they're counting all music sales - not just online store sales. Overall, music sales are still falling, and the increase in digital music sales isn't offsetting the collapse of CD sales. Record companies are looking for anyhting that will open the field up and get people to start spending money on any delivery format for music.

Of course, don't tell the astroturfers who write articles like this. You might bring them a little too close to reality.

Digital Music Sales Doubled in 2006 [msn.com]

Digital Music sales to more than double in the next five years [forbes.com]

Re:Change only comes through

[dsraistlin]

That is because with Apple it does not always just work. If you are the only user and owner of a mac it works almost all of the time. However if you are setting up macs in a network where multiple users use the machine it can be more of a pain in the ass than the current XP limited accounts to get software to work.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[morgan_greywolf]

They've got too much invested in their format to abandon it now. However, I think that if the music industry would let them they'd be more than happy to sell unprotected AAC files.

Interesting. What makes you say that? I haven't seen any behavior out of Apple that indicates that it would be willing to sell DRM-free music or movies of any kind.

Re:Oh, the irony

[delt0r]

\puts on tinfoil hat

Perhaps M$ want DRM to tie down the PC hardware market to The One OS. The whole: "its the content providers that made me do it", is just the PR department.

So it goes like this. In the future to buy something online your bank needs you to have a certified trusted computing OS. To get certified reqiures 50,000 US dollars, so there is no free certified version of linux that would work. Then the hardware won't even run a non certified OS because of the "dangers" of uncertified drivers and code running on the hardware. It will be call Genuine Lockin.

\takes of tinfoil hat

Re:Goodbye itunes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ripped your own CD's, then they are not copy-protected and you are not in any way committed to Apple or Apple's DRM. Use the tracks on any player or computer that supports AAC (if that's what you ripped them to), or use iTunes or another app to convert them to any format you want.

Re:Apple would just sell DRM-free music

[Anonymous Coward]

We got an iPod shuffle because of DRM. I originally got an MP3 player for my wife. However, we have a Mac, and every non-apple music site has a custom DRM application you have to download, which only works on Windows. The few sites that have mp3 songs do not have the songs that she wants.

I know we could have used iTunes and stripped off the DRM with JHymn, but it was important to my wife to be able to buy and listen to music by herself (she's not particularly technically minded), and it would have been an unacceptable pain.

So I returned the mp3 player and got an iPod Shuffle.

So, yes, if there was an mp3 version available, we'd ditch iTunes in a second.

On the upside, in the course of searching for mp3 music sites, I discovered eMusic.com, which has less popular music, and I've been catching up on some classics - Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, and the like - for $.33 a song, in mp3 format.

Re:Change only comes through

[frogstar_robot]

ACLs are an option in the Linux/BSD world. There aren't that many that take advantage because ACLs can create as many problems as they solve. I wouldn't be surprised if the BSD backend of OS X supported them as well. Still, the lack of Finder support for them is suggestive.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[Khuffie]

Apple has been given permission by indie labels to sell their music without DRM, music said labels sell without DRM in places like eMusic.com. Apple refuses to sell unprotected AAC files, even at the request of copyright holders.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[nine-times]

I doubt Apple would ever switch to MP3s. They've got too much invested in their format to abandon it now.

On a side note, it's not "their format". AAC [wikipedia.org] was made by many of the same groups that put together MP3, and it's just as standard as MP3, but actually less patent-encumbered than MP3 (though still not patent-free), and with generally superior quality at the same bitrate. Apple's DRM is proprietary, but the AAC format is not.

And no, they won't switch. There's no compelling reason for Apple to move to MP3, and technically Apple would have to pay patent-holders to distribute MP3s. According to the wikipedia article, AAC doesn't require licensing fees to be paid to patent-holders for content distribution.

Re:Why would games drop DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

mute

Moot moot moot moot.

What the hell is with people's grasp of the English language?
Common Errors in English [wsu.edu]

Re:Anything but MP3 ...

[badasscat]

AAC or OGG please, but not MP3 - you need twice the bitrate for comparable quality :(

Can we please just put this myth to bed once and for all? I mean Christ, this test was posted right here on this site, years ago: http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.h tm [listening-tests.info]

Scroll to the bottom - the difference in quality is negligible at the same bit rate. It always has been (well, ever since LAME popped up). And given the tradeoff in convenience and industry support, I'd take mp3 any day of the week.

Re:This has been coming for some time

[ewhac]

One of the things that's holding them back, is that the movie and especially the games industries are putting pressure on the music one not to drop DRM because they fear the domino effect.

Oh, please, it's because of the games industry that we have copy protection at all. They invented this boogeyman back in the 1970's and have been fighting this losing battle ever since. The only effect it's had is to make Macromedia rich selling the same defective merchandise over and over again.

The "mainstream" software market swallowed the Kool-Aid and, for a while during the 1980's, productivity apps -- paint programs, word processors, databases, etc. -- had copy-protected media. The methods were myriad: Intentionally defective floppies, look up a word in the accompanying manual, stick a "dongle" in a port somewhere, et al. Eventually, the marketplace told them to grow the fsck up and get rid of the artificial defects. Mainstream vendors heeded this advice, but the games executives stuck their fingers in their ears, shouted "LA LA LA LA LA!" and kept shipping defective media.

Since the clearly stated opinion of the marketplace didn't matter to them, I hardly think it will matter if the music and/or movie industry decides to see reason. The games industry will still use copy protection, it still won't improve their revenue, and it still will accomplish nothing except to annoy lawful owners.

The RIAA should tell them to go lump it (they're good at telling people that).

Schwab

Re:Anything but MP3 ...

[bradediger]

Apple radically reworked the playback engine for iTunes 7, resulting in major sound quality improvements for MP3 playback

That sounds fishy. The MP3 decoding algorithm is specified to the bit level, within certain tolerances (according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). All of the audio tweaks are supposed to happen on the encoding side.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[jandrese]

Eh, China's "average income" is a tricky thing to measure though. The vast throng of peasant farmers don't download digital music anyway because they don't have a computer. The moderized city dwellers however have the disposable income to spend on CDs/online music if they wanted to, but don't because pirated stuff is available everywhere and the legitimate stuff can be difficult to find. By offering people a way to buy stuff legitimately the labels aren't planning to wipe out piracy, but rather to actually make some money in a market where they've previously done almost nothing. You might say "but why would I buy something I can pirate for free?", but I'd point you to the iTunes Music Store and how much money it has made despite being in a very similar situation.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[morgan_greywolf]

You avoided the question instead of answering it. You said all sorts of things that indicate absolutely nothing about Apple's tendencies in regard to DRM-less music.

And whether Apple is in the music business to sell iPods or the iPod business to sell music isn't clear, and is actually irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The fact of the matter is that in the trailing 9 months ending on July 1, 2006, Apple received nearly $1.5 billion in net sales from its iTunes-related business. Yes, that's only a 1/4 of what it got from iPod sales, but I'm willing to bet the profit margins are much better on iTunes sales than they are on iPods.