by Playfuls Staff |
21st July 2006
In the battle for the dominance in the digital music industry Sony and Yahoo have made a daring step: they are now offering more expensive tracks, but with no DRM.[more]
The first MP3 that can be downloaded from Yahoo Music is Jessica Simpson's A Public Affair. The implication of being DRM-free is that the tune can be played on any MP3 player, no matter the brand (iPod from Apple, Zen from Creative, Sansa from SanDisk, etc.). Other famous sites that allow music downloads only offer tunes with DRM, which makes them incompatible with some MP3 players (it is the case for Apple’s iTunes, Napster or Rhapsody).
DRM (digital right management) forbids users to make more copies of the downloaded tunes than those specified in the DRM and does not allow customers to share them (in some cases).
Although up until now record companies and record labels have refused to enter the DRM-free market, consumer advocates think that this is the beginning of a trend.
"It's about time," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior attorney with the public interest group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is an important signal that the labels may be finally realizing that DRM is hindering the size of the market."
DRM-free tunes is not something very new and spectacular since eMusic is already offering more than a million songs in MP3 format, but most of them come from independent record companies.
"We've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now," writes Yahoo Music blogger Ian Rogers. "DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc., instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway."
The Recording Industry Association of America, a music industry trade group, declined to comment on Yahoo's preference for selling MP3 music files.
"As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now," Rogers wrote. "Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the compact disc) or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform."
According to Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at technology research company Jupiter Research, the DRM-free music download proposed by Yahoo and Sony is only a promotion which will not last long enough to establish a general trend.
“It's very, very unlikely that we're going to see any mainstream music sold without digital rights management, without the approval of the record labels," Gartenberg said. "The labels are certainly not going to go for it. It's been a staple of their existence."
The price for the MP3-format tunes is $1.99, two times bigger than the price for a downloaded tune from iTunes ($0.99). Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music wrote in his Blog post Wednesday that the higher price reflects the fact that the song can be personalized by including the downloader's name, not that the track is DRM-free. Rogers goes on to say that he thinks the price of DRM-free tracks should be between $2 and the usual $1 pricing.
Ted Cohen, a former top executive at EMI Music who now runs consultant TAG Strategic, says rivals will be watching the results closely. "This gives us all something to go on, to see what the consumer reaction will be," he says.
He doesn't think it signals the beginning of the end of DRM. "If anybody thinks DRM will be gone in six months, well, that's not about to happen."
One probable reason for which Sony BMG is implied in this project is to erase partially the negative image they have been fighting with since the scandal with the copy-protected CDs they sold to customers, which later turned out to be a perfect tool for a computer virus.
