This should be the end of music-DRM
Finally. I guess I can start using iTunes to buy music now – I didn’t until now because I don’t buy tracks that tie me to a particular piece of hardware or restrict the number of devices I can play a song on. After all, I have a few computers around the house and mobile devices as well. So far, I’ve mainly bought the good old CDs (I actually also like having the booklet with all the lyrics) and then ripped them to MP3. Occasionally, I’ve used Amazon UK to buy MP3 tracks, which I may continue to do even now, if the price is right. But since I manage my song library in iTunes anyway, if the price is the same, I may as well now buy iTunes Plus songs without DRM. They can even be converted to MP3 at the click of a button.
This is all coming waaaay later than I would have expected, but at least it is finally happening. I have been critical of DRM for years and at least in the music sector, we now finally seem to get rid of it. That of course doesn’t help people who already bought songs on iTunes before – Apple charge a hefty 30 Cents per song to “upgrade” them to a non-DRM format. Which is probably all going to the labels, who seem to have found a great way to charge twice for music people have already bought. Techcrunch even calls it a “$1.8 Billion music tax”, which is not all that far from the truth.
Unfortunately, now that it has taken the music industry a decade to come to its senses, it’s safe to assume that it will take the rest of the media industry another 5 years at least until they also finally come to the conclusion that DRM is a failed concept that will not help them sell more copies of their digital goods. But I’m convinced that it will happen eventually. Until then, the only thing we can do is give as much support to the small niche-providers of DRM-free media as possible. And keep complaining… and breaking DRM schemes to prove that any media that can still be played back can and will be broken (just to clarify: I do not support piracy, but I do support the right of the individual who purchased a movie to format shift and play it on whichever device they choose).
Add comment January 7th, 2009