NY Times: Amazon to sell music without copy protection
Yesterday Amazon announced that it would, later this year, open up a music download store where MP3 files would be sold without any digital rights management (also known as DRM). This would enable the files to be listened to on virtually any electronic device: iPods, computers, laptops, even cell phones (more and more I’m seeing people with headphones on, bopping up and down to music, but the headphones are plugged into a Razr and not an iPod). This is a pretty big deal, and while EMI announced a few weeks ago that it would be the first label to agree to sell its music without DRM, Amazon is the first retailer (of this size) to open a digital store where everything is sold sans DRM.
As reported in The New York Times: “The move could be another step toward the demise of the copy-protection systems that have frustrated some online music buyers and created confusion about compatibility between digital players and downloaded songs. Critics charge that the software has slowed the public embrace of legal digital downloads while failing to stop illicit copying, at a time when the music industry is desperate for ways to make up for declining CD sales.”
The CD, as has been reported on this blog and elsewhere, is dead; digital downloads could be the thing that saves the music industry. However, all downloads are not created the same. With songs swaddled in DRM, consumers can only play them on certain devices. But to have them be unencrypted means that consumers will truly own the music that they buy, and will be able to do whatever they want with it. And in terms of piracy concerns, to repeat Tim O’Reilly’s quote (which I seem to do every six weeks or so), “Piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is.” With all of the competition that music now faces in terms of the amount of attention consumers have to spare — due to the rise of Myspace, Youtube, blogs, RSS and podcasts — the trick is getting them interested in music in the first place. And if this is a success (for Amazon, consumers, and the music business) this could lead to the disappearance of DRM for movies, TV shows, and even books, that are distributed and delivered digitally.
NY Times: Amazon to Sell Music Without Copy Protection
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Exciting news! On our library website we offer lots of kinds of digital downloads, but it’s an embarrassment putting patrons through all kinds of stupid DRM hoops and restrictions, even for free. So confusing for them and I think ultimately pointless for us.
There’s a bit of a gap in the chart from NYT here — it shows how traditional album sales are dropping, and digital singles are rising…but what about digital album sales? No doubt the music industry is still hemorrhaging money, but what’s their total revenue when both analog and digital are taken into account? The net on digital sales must be higher than analog, so their op costs have to be down when they’re printing less albums, no?