I'll be honest, I thought Steve Jobs was blowing smoke when he encouraged the end of DRM. I still think the timing around the unfair business practices investigations in the EU is way, way too convenient to be a coincidence. It really did have all the hallmarks of a diversion and little more. So I'll give him all the credit in the world for actually making it happen.
You've heard the news by now of course, but I have to tell you, reading the transcript from the press conference with Steve and the guy from EMI is a gas.
Some highlights that I haven't seen mentioned widely yet:
- The DRM-free tunes will be at twice the data rate.
- Your current EMI downloads from the iTMS can be upgraded to higher-quality, DRM-free for the difference in price. (This is a no-brainer purchase, IMO.)
- EMI is making their DRM-free music available to any music store to sell. And why not? They want the money, and more stores offers the potential of more money.
Anyway, you definitely want to check it out.
In the meantime, Microsoft followed this up with their own story about working on DRM-free music themselves. I still kinda like Microsoft. But this is just sad.
OTOH, the article I cite above is riddled with errors, starting with four of the first five words. It calls Apple a "digital music pioneer." What?!? Apple came late to the game, and aren't even close to the first to offer DRM-free music. They've also offered among the lowest bandwidth music for a long time, so stop with the pioneer chatter. There are other errors, too. You could make looking for them a drinking game...as if you don't have enough of those already.
Now here's the thing. None of this is even close to the "death knell" for DRM, which will surely be around even longer than cockroaches.
It's also easy to forget that there's a large-ish industry that makes money selling DRM technologies, and they're not about to give up their livelihoods without a fight. And since their customers are almost all much, much bigger than EMI, well, the cockroach thing.
DRM Watch sounds like it would be keeping their eye on DRM mongers. Nope, it's keeping an eye on DRM foes. You'll want to take a shower after reading this, but you should read it anyway.
The headline says the story's about Microsoft jumping on the DRM bandwagon, but it's actually an overwrought screed. Here's one of several money quotes: "As far as EMI is concerned, the deal was shortsighted, risky, and possibly irresponsible to the company's shareholders."
Here's another: "A more effective arrangement would have been with a major multinational retailer, like Amazon or Target, that has no current digital music strategy."
Actually, not quite true. I know for a fact that Amazon has a digital music strategy...or the beginnings of one. One of the coolest recuitment pitches I ever got was from Amazon, who asked me to head up their digital music strategy and create their online music store. We had several phone conversations where they put the full court press on me. Ridiculous money and benefits, in a good way. It was pretty overwhelming. But I think when they got my resume, they realized they were looking for another Tim Wilson.
Last one: "Apple...stands to benefit most from any additional unauthorized copying resulting from the lack of DRM." Maybe, but only to the extent that they sell the most music players. As Steve J. points out, the vast majority of iTunes owners have never purchased a thing from iTMS. Their iPods are filled with the legal, DRM-free rips of their own disks. I think he's absolutely right.
No, here's the last one: "we believe that the number of consumers who would truly benefit from "interoperability" is small." Riiiiiiight.
Choose what you drink carefully when you read this, because you'll surely be shooting it through your nose with laughter.
Okay, after raining on DRM Watch's parade, the article makes some interesting observations.
One is that EMI is getting a cash advance of $5 million from Apple. He says that, combined with the new sales of online tracks, we're talking about 3% of EMI's annual digital sales of $290 Million from digital revenue (really? that sounds high to me), and a tiny fraction of the company's overall revenue of about $3.4 Billion. He's not at all clear if this is simply music revenue or includes publishing, etc. -- but that's to be expected. His goal isn't clarity as much as it is to protect his own DRM business.
That said, this squares with my own impression of the impact of online music store downloads relative to hard-copy sales -- in the low single-digit percentage range.
He also has some interesting speculation that the real intent of EMI's move was to drive up the price of Warner's attempt to acquire them. I'm not buying it, but it's still interesting.
Anyway, I have to agree with him that DRM is far from dead.
Yet.
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