Another victory for users who want simple interoperability and portability of their purchased digital music to/from different devices… phone, PC, MP3 player, sonic cloud in the sky… we knew it would happen, it was a question of when and in what order the big four would try selling digital without restriction. Seems the dominoes are coming down faster now, a late Christmas present for an industry who now admits they blundered for a decade instead of adapting to trends in user behavior and consumption of digital music. (Read: stop making my buy CDs if I don’t want them, let me play my music wherever I go). Yes, Sony, the same company who installed the infamous “rootkit” spyware on your computer, that garnered them more ill will from customers any any RIAA lawsuit could have garnered.
Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM (via BusinessWeek)
In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.
Getting Hip to the Internet
The impetus to lift copyright protection represents a sea change for the recording industry, which for the better part of a decade has used DRM to guard against what it considers illegal distribution and duplication of songs purchased online. In abandoning DRM on à la carte song purchases, the labels could create a raft of new, less restrictive ways of selling music over the Internet, such as through social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.
full article at BusinessWeek
It was refreshing to read Chief Executive Officer of Warner Music Group Edgar Bronfman break down the “us vs. our customers” mentality in such stark terms: respect consumer desire or die trying to go to war with them:
We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.
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