The Death-Throws of DRM
Welcome to history. We have been following this story here at the GGP and we have all predicted it, even Knightwise got it right. The writting is on the wall for DRM, woot! But 2008 might just see the grave dug and the last flower thrown. No tears shed and much dancing on graves.
Duncan Reily points out today in Techcrunch that Sony will be dropping the DRM thing. The last of the four major companies hanging onto the archaic stuffed up idea. Tracks will be available through Amazon. Great news. It is OK we can over look the whole root-kit thing for this good deed, still it took you long enough (all of you!).
While the record companies are walking away from DRM, I wonder what iTunes will do, well Apple at any rate. Because iTunes will essentially become one of the biggest DRM’ed music distributors of the world. Are people going to stick with iTUnes to buy their music that they can get elsewhere with no DRM? Now that will be interesting. If the record companies don’t insist on it then maybe Apple will ditch it as well. Steve Jobs did say last year that if it was up to him there would be no DRM. I hope that he steps up to the plate and we see major changes in iTunes as a result of this move.
This is especially pertinent in the face of the digital music sales for 2007 that was released this week. There has been a massive 50% increase in digital sales in the last year. With a decrease in the sale of physical CD’s of 14%. Not only that it would seem that the consumer is changing the way they buy music.
There has also been a decline in whole album sales. Consumers are buying selected tracks from albums rather than the whole thing. This has been spurred on by the digital revolution which enables people to do this. Plus it is inexpensive to do so. What might come about as a result of this is that record labels will dictate a premium for popular tracks. But then more fool both them and the bands for adding crap tracks to a decent album, then maybe we will get better albums with less fluff in the hopes to snare a complete sale.
Me I am a bit of a whole album man, if I like a few tracks I will usually get the whole album. I am not usually disappointed buying this way. But if it is just the one track then I just get that one. Being available digitally means that I don’t have to wait for the right single, or get it illegally. I can pick up that one track for a dollar or two. Which is why we are seeing more of this type of buying behavior. It will mean that things are going to change in many ways. What, where and who I am not foolish enough to predict.
Great news on the DRM front, the Apple response will be interesting and maybe one day there will be no such thing as a physical CD.
Dave
January 6th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Great post Dave. I am more of an album type of guy as well. I enjoy having all the songs from a particular album versus 1 or 2. Granted, some albums only have 1 or 2 good songs them. The best thing about the albumn approach for me is that, there is a wide selection, and I can rip the music off of the CD into MP3s that I can then do anything I want with. Once the majority or all music becomes DRM free, I will probably be spending a boat load of money on new music, especially because of services like Pandora which let me discover new music that I really like.
January 6th, 2008 at 6:29 am
I prefer to have a physical CD, personally. I don’t download music from the iTunes store or any other music service. A CD doesn’t corrupt or get deleted, and it’s pretty hard to damage a CD unless you try really hard. I generally buy a CD, run it through iTunes and then transfer it to my iPod. The only downside is now I have all these plastic discs laying around taking up space.
Some artists used to sell CDs with some sort of copy protection on them, software really, that would run when you put the CD into a computer preventing you from ripping the CD through iTunes. It would allow you to copy the CD through their software, but only three times before it locked itself up. I stopped buying these sorts of CDs because it was annoying to have to run the CD through Audacity to make an MP3 that I could load up onto my iPod. I haven’t seen a lot of these CDs around anymore, so maybe they’ve stopped using this sort of “protection”?
January 6th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I just walked in the door from a trip to the big city. The first place I stopped? My local CD store, where I dropped more than a hundred bucks on some new CDs. (Would have spent more, but I had one other big purchase to make
)
I’ve been buying and ripping my CDs for years, and I’ll continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I’ve begun to buy the odd thing online when I really only want a single track, or maybe want to get something that’s difficult to find.
The CD will be around for several years yet. We’ve been hearing about the paperless society for decades since the advent of Information Technology but in reality the paper trails have gotten longer and the creation of physical artifacts has increased.
CDs are the physical artifact of the music industry, and though I convert _every_ CD I buy to MP3 within hours of buying it, I still buy the disc.
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@Herne: The digital copy protection on CDs has been all but abandoned. The “feature” hurt sales for the artists who used it, as well as confusing and irritating the fans who purchased the discs. And as you said, it didn’t really stop people from copying the music, it just added a step.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
The core line of the entire article is and must be .. : ” Knightwise was right”