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."

Achilles' Heel

[Billosaur]

From the article:

Most of the push for music unencumbered by digital rights management, or DRM, systems over the past six months has come from technology, electronics and Internet companies. In part, it is because these companies have been largely unsuccessful in their efforts to produce digital locks that are simple and flexible for the consumer, foolproof to the hacker and workable on numerous makes and models of players.

Which is why DRM is quite useless. Come on -- if worse came to worse, people would play the music on the stereos and record it using digital recorders then run it through their favorite piece of audio manipulating software and have just about the same quality recording. The music industry cannot hope to stop the myriad of innovative ways of copying music and they are fooling themselves if they think they can make DRM "unbreakable." If this report is true, perhaps some in the industry are finally coming to their senses.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[GizmoToy]

I doubt Apple would ever switch to MP3s. 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. They've gotten as far as they have because of the iPod itself, not the DRM locking users into the system. If you ask iPod users without any iTunes Music Store purchases if they'd switch players when it's time to upgrade, I doubt more than a small percentage plan to follow their iPod up with anything else.

Change only comes through

[El Gruga]

PAIN, and now the Music Biz is feeling pain, so they have to adapt. What else can they do? Their monopoly is over, but they should understand that most 'ordinary folks' will prefer to download music from a legal site, and those same folks dont understand DRM, they just want it to work. .....Its amazing that Apple hasnt taken over the world with that notion of 'it just works'.

Indeed

[sterno]

Though I think the practicality of doing the kind of recording you're talking about is minimal, the underlying truth is valid: where there's a will there's a way.

What we are talking about here is basically securing something. You are securing data against copying. Ask anybody in the security industry if there's such a thing as a security system that cannot be broken. If they say that such a beast exists, they are trying to sell you said mythological creature and you should run quickly.

All you can do with security is hope to make something secure enough that it's not worth somebody's trouble to break it. The problem is that only one person has to break the security to make the entire security regime worthless. Furthermore, efforts to increase the security generally increase the complexity and risk making it difficult for legitimate customers to make use of the product.

Good, but I don't forget that easily

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very good that they are considering to ditching DRM.
But its not by their own will they are considering that, its because they have to.

Now, DRM-less music is fair. I will never ever buy DRM-crippled music.
I wonder what prices they will take, low, reasonable or overpriced?

Either way, just because its fair with the non-DRM music, does not mean I will just forget what they did and happily and gladly buy their music now even if its not DRM-crippled.

All their lobbying, scare tactics, intimidation, and evilness. I won't forget that. I don't forget that easily.

Vendor lock-in is bad for the record companies

[grimJester]

Current DRM is mostly useful for locking the consumers into one single vendor for their mp3 players. It might give the record companies some benefit in the long run, as customers would have to buy their music a second time if they buy a new mp3 player, but it certainly eats into their profits right now.

There are alternatives

[zesty42]

Perhaps, they are realizing that DRM is causing them to lose not only revenue (in terms of people buying less) but market share (people buying elsewhere). I used to buy music that I heard on the radio like everyone else. Since the Sony rootkit mess I get my music from eMusic [emusic.com]. I've found a lot of great bands/labels. Now, no matter what the major labels do, I'll never go back to them 100%. Another less techie friend of mine just recently got fed up with iTunes DRM and ask me to help find something else... guess where I'm pointing.

Stupid comment of the day

[gradster79]

Stupid comment of the day, courtesy of the article: In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. "We're for interoperability," he said, "and there's nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability."

Looks like I was wrong.

[Andy Dodd]

In a previous post on a different article, I commented that the music industry was stupid not to look at the success of allofmp3.com and learn from it. While allofmp3 was bad for the RIAA in that the revenue stream broke down between the user and the RIAA (it ended at allofmp3), its success proved that users ARE willing to pay for their content if provided conveniently at a reasonable price in a usable format.

In short, they need to make themselves cost competitive with P2P. How do you make yourself cost competitive with something that is free?

The same way people compete with (and/or make money from) freely available open-source software. Don't market the product itself, market convenience associated with that product. For open-source software, that convenience is packaging and tech support/customization contracts. For music, that convenience is selection and a guarantee of quality. allofmp3 succeeded for three reasons:
Very low prices (Probably too low for the RIAA's tastes, but even twice the price of allofmp3 would have appealed to many. RIAA could make up for the low per-track revenue via significantly higher volume. e.g. back in the days of pyMusique, I bought quite a few single $1 tracks, but no complete albums. With allofmp3, I frequently would purchase an entire album for $3-$4 even though I was only looking for one track from that album initially.)
Convenience - allofmp3 had a great selection that made it far easier to find music than on any P2P network. Only the RIAA has the capability to actually beat that selection. Also, people would be more willing to give credit card info to a "trusted" source rather than a clearly shady Russian company with apparent mob ties.
Last, but clearly not least - no DRM. DRM goes way beyond nullifying the above "convenience aspect", and in fact makes P2P the more convenient option, free or not.

Wrong problem, wrong solution

[UnknowingFool]

The music companies seem to think that by making online music without DRM, they will help their sagging sales. I don't think that what plagues the industry. Like all industries, the music industry wants growth every year. But they compare sales today to what it was in the boom days. Back then, sales were booming because the CD was replacing tape and vinyl as the preferred medium. The industry didn't seem to see that some sales were people replacing their collection as opposed to buying new music. There are other reasons too (some which were self-inflicted), and it was covered in a Frontline episode called The Way the Music Died [pbs.org] that chronicles the music industry today.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[killbill!]

I suspect they expected the PlayForSure side to prevail. PlayForSure meant an atomized online music market. It meant no single company dominated it. It meant labels still controlled access to the market.

But Apple prevailed. FairPlay prevents current iTMS customers from switching to another online music store. It ensures current iTMS customers remain future iTMS customers. FairPlay is the cornerstone of Apple's total domination on the (legal) online music market. It means Apple controls the access to the market, and no longer the music labels.

Every time a customer downloads a song that is infested with DRM at the request of the RIAA, record labels are putting an additional nail into their own coffin. If they want to break free from Apple's de facto monopoly, they have to drop the DRM requirement. Looks like they finally got it.

Re:Looks like I was wrong.

[Znork]

"In short, they need to make themselves cost competitive with P2P. How do you make yourself cost competitive with something that is free?"

That's the rub; the entire industry is built upon monopoly control, it is _not_ cost competetive. Allofmp3, eMusic, last.fm, etc have proven there are a multitude of models around convenience that work fine for music distribution (even for uncopyrighted classical music), but _only_ if you have a cost structure that supports the model.

That means no more media blitzes. No huge launches. No payola. No hundreds of thousands of free cd's sent to dj's and radio stations. No half a million dollar videos for MTV. No coke parties.

But without those things, they cant control the market anymore, they wont be able to shove their particular artists down the listeners throats and push the independents to the side. They need the huge per-artist revenue and expenditures to minimize the variability and risk in the market, and that entails a high level of control and a high unit price to recoup the expenses.

I've never bought DRM tunes

[nightsweat]

And I used to buy a lot of CD's. I buy fewer now, because I'm older and pickier, and I've looked at iTunes and other stores, but I just didn't want to have to go through the buy, burn, rip cycle to remove the DRM. If the label actually allow drm'less mp3's, and make it as easy to buy as an iTune purchase, I'll buy a lot more music a song at a time on impulse.

It's the Economics, Stupid

[hobo sapiens]

The Economics of a matter drive behaviour. DRM is not economically viable. The RIAA is greedy, but they aren't stupid. Follow me:

*It costs money to produce new DRM schemes.
*DRM is easily and routinely cracked or bypassed by pirates.
*The people who want to pirate will pirate, the people who willingly buy music will continue to do so.

Abandoning, or at least containing DRM is just a matter of time and is really just an acceptance of reality. It's pointless and costly. Even if they don't totally abandon DRM, I can see them giving up on building the perfect scheme and just sticking with the easily bypassed and/or cracked schemes they have now. If someone claims that it somehow cost-effective to try and stay a step ahead of the pirates' ability to crack DRM, I'd say that person is deluding himself. And once it becomes too costly to keep up the arms race, they will stop. I'd say we're close to that point.

Removing DRM: Necessary? Sufficient?

[MattW]

It will be interesting to see. Personally, DRM IS the #1 reason I don't buy more music. I can't be bothered fooling around with p2p networks. Busy, bad quality, lawsuits, spyware, etc. Unacceptable. On the other hand, I don't want to buy from places like iTunes - though I occasionally do - because I'm already irked about CDs I can't locate or that suffered damage when moving that I can't rip. I'm not interested in a bunch of music I won't be able to play when Apple goes bankrupt or only produces mp3 players I hate. (long live the iPod)

But am I normal? I don't think so. Some of my other technical co-workers have argued that iTunes and the iPod have won massive acceptance via ease of use, and that's all most people think about. I'm not completely in concurrence: I think people know that "mp3" means fully cross-platform compatible. No matter what you're using for software or hardware, the mp3s will play. People confused about what will work - iTunes, iPod, Zune, playsforsure, Rhapsody, ogg, m4p, m4a, aac - could easily get dizzy from the myriad technologies in play, and simply not want to buy. They get iPods, rip their CDs, and that's that.

I don't think that DRM-free music will kill filesharing. But I am quite certain it will not ENABLE more filesharing. It's already trivial, and frankly, p2p networks are now overrated. People have built such monstrous mp3 collections and storage is now cheap that the duplication is happening en masse. People who connect in real life can easily swap gigs of data. Broadband is more widely deployed, and a simple memory stick with 2GB worth of music is a fast way to distribute massive amounts of music. Or burn a data DVD.

But even if DRM inhibits online music sales to would-be legitimate customers like myself, is that sufficient? Would music priced at $.99/song and $9.99/album be sufficient to attract? Certainly I'd buy a fair bit. I'm not at all against flexible pricing, because I buy music for the long haul, and my interest in collecting the latest hits is nil. I'd prefer access to a backcatalog for less, over $.99 fresh hits. (Although they could price the backcatalog cheaper AND still cap at $.99)

Either way, DRM is bad for consumers, bad for music, and AT BEST non-impactful for record companies. Removing it may not save them, but it won't hurt them. There's only upside here.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[tyme]

GizmoToy [slashdot.org] wrote:

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

When, in the last decade, has Apple shown any reluctance to abandon proprietary technologies, in which they had a large investment, rather than adopt industry standards? Hm, lets see:

• I doubt Apple would ever switch to PCI. They've got too much invested in Nubus to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to IDE. They've got too much invested in SCSI to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB. They've got too much invested in ADB to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB2. They've got too much invested in Firewire to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to Intel CPUs. They've got too much invested in PowerPC to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to PDF. They've got too much invested in QuickDraw to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to VGA/DVI. They've got too much invested in their proprietary video connector to abandon it now.
  
• I doubt Apple would ever switch to a multi-button mouse. They've got too much invested in the single button mouse to abandon it now.
  

Apple just hasn't shown, in the last 10 years, any reluctance to abandon existing, home-grown, technologies when the market has provided an adequate alternative.

Besides, the iPod and iTunes already support MP3s, all Apple would need to do is switch the format that iTunes uses to distibute purchased music.

Cluestick and consumer votes

[Technician]

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'.

Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.

A few bands jumping ship to go to a non-DRM music site is probably the biggest clue stick they got. If they don't have a monopoly on the artists, they have no control. These are desprate times for the labels. Bare Naked Ladies has gone to e-music. Some of the newer TSB stuff is not on RIAA cartel labels. (Too bad the Wizards of Winter track is in a RIAA cartel album. It's the reason I haven't bought it yet.)

The RIAA cartel labels have to make a big move fast before this leak grows and takes down the ship. They are busy trying to patch the P-P hole with a product that doesn't sell well because it is mostly useless to most people.

Maybe soon I can buy tracks in MP3 that I can play besides some obscure indi stuff on e-music.

Remember, I have rejected DRM music tracks and stuck with the most universal standard in the world. MP3's play on my flash player, all my computers, my DVD player (as MP3 CD) and in my car.

No other format is that compatible in my mixed environment. The incompatible DRM formats has kept me out of online music stores. Now if they will do something about the price fixing at a high price. Even better would be to fix the "for private home use only" restrictions so I can also legaly do one of the Christmas Light Shows, or play a ripped CD with a wedding slide show at a wedding reception, and post the video without breaking a bunch of license clauses in the process.

They have no simple way to use CD's in any public performance such as a public light show, a public wedding slide show, or DJ'ing the reception dance as an amature DJ. All these public performances are prohibited by the Private Home use clause.

I would have bought lots of music if I could have actualy used it. It was too restricted to be of much use in todays world. DRM was just icing on the cake making the expensive product even less useful.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[shakestheclown]

God, it never ceases to amaze me the extremes that people are willing to explain away to justify the companies that they like. And then they never miss an opportunity to read evil into the actions of a company that they dislike.

News: Apple doesn't sell music without DRM. Response: Oh, the labels won't let them.
News: Some labels gave Apple the opportunity to sell music without DRM, but Apple refuses. Response: Oh, what if there was a mistake? The legality! Apple is safer this way.

Give me a break.

And just as bad is the post above about how Apple only uses a proprietary DRM to combat Microsoft's EVIIIL proprietary DRM.

Re:Undermining Apple?

[JWW]

I'm sure they'd love to stick it to Jobs, especially after he screwed them out of their variable pricing scheme.

But theres the rub. I believe that in order to dethrone iTunes record companies would have to sell DRM-free music for the same price or less. 99 cents is actually too much. Even without DRM, I would still buy from iTunes if DRM-free music was more expensive.

Although, if you couldn't iTunes purchases to CD, the equation would change. Apples movie store is unusable in my opinion because it lacks a burn to DVD feature.

Re:Looks like I was wrong.

[fyoder]

Don't forget 'choice of format'. In fact I'd replace 'no DRM' with that, since given choice I don't think many would choose a DRM encumbered format. I like high quality oggs, and allofmp3.com provides that. Someone else might prefer mp3. Others a lossless format.

Re:It will be the last act of the recording indust

[mikewolf]

i guess it depends on what your idea of 'making a decent living' is... i think the days of the super star musicians are far from over -- we will always have the uber-pop superstar favorite of the week who's albums go platinum the week they are released...

but, being a musician is being an artist, and unfortunatly most artists don't get paid well in the u.s. The internet and non-DRM'ed music isn't to blame for why the recording artists are having trouble making money, its the broken profit model. recording and distribution used to be mega expensive. Now i can buy a computer for 3,000 bucks that will allow me to create studio quality recorded music. i can buy add a video camera for another 2 or 3 thousand, and now can create studio quality video. I'm not really sure why the record companies still spend hundred's of thousands to produce a record, but you just don't have to, and the smaller and newer artists are just starting to figure that out. People aren't spending less money on music, they are just spending it differently.

sorry to be harsh, but maybe we would be better off with musicians who didn't care so much about making a living, and were really just into music

Re:Undermining Apple?

[wootest]

I actually modded you insightful, and I still stand behind that and the general thrust of your post, but I have issues with two of these.

They never switched "from Firewire to USB2" on anything other than the iPod for cost and space reasons (cheaper to support one interface than both). Firewire is an IEEE standard - IEEE1394 to be precise. In addition to Apple actively using both Firewire and USB, Firewire as a published standard is just as "proprietary" as is USB.

PowerPC to Intel: The x86 architecture is just as proprietary as PowerPC is. They did move towards what's more common in the industry, but they did not "abandon proprietary technology".

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Isnt it obvious ?

[unity100]

let me tell you one thing,

if they sold the songs in mp3, high quality format, and guaranteed that they will be available forever, i would not even bother saving zillions of mp3 in my hard disks and trying to transport them to new pcs, friends', relatives', acquintances' computers, worry about the loss of mp3s in the event of a hd format is needed (windows reinstall etc), and so on, and instead just DELETE them whenever im in distress and just get what i want from the OFFICIAL site for 1 cents per song again.

same goes for movies. WHY the hell try to maintain them in cds, dvds or etc when you can just download them in high quality format from its ORIGINAL seller ? JUST sell it for something reasonable, NEGLIGIBLE - for maybe, say, $5 ? It is not even the price of a regular hamburger dammit ? WHENEVER i want to watch a movie, i would just download it, watch, and delete without any worries. No disk space use, no corruption, hell and even no worries that children might find and watch some no-no movies for their age ...

Games. god. If games were sold for $5 or so a piece, why not buy MANY games ? huh ? Just for the sake of trying, there is no barrier to buying them $5 per piece. Even the thought that, 'i might want to play something like this maybe sometime' would without any worries of expensiveness or anything would let anyone buy the games they would NOT normally buy then. Heck, even for collections maybe.

Actually, the execs, policy makers and old coots in the helm of media companies, you are witless idiots.

Have you gone such a road, internet would be busy with zillions of terabytes downloaded everyday from your products and you would be busy trying to get more accountants to do the accounting instead of lawyers for trying to fight against 'the people'.