Apparently the last of the Big 5 music labels has finally thrown in the towel on DRM, which is a good thing. Explaining exactly why is a little difficult, especially to people who kinda missed the tech thing. I mean, DRM sounds like one of those good ideas that makes sense, only it doesn’t. Kinda like donating hair for cancer kids.
Artists make music. You buy music. Artist gets paid. You copy music for free, artist doesn’t get paid. DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology prevents you from playing music without proving you bought it. Sounds good, right?
Leaving aside the little open secret that artists don’t get paid when you buy their music (the labels get paid, but hardly ever the artist), it never made any sense from a consumer standpoint, and since that’s the guy/gal who’s paying the cash, it’s REALLY important to see things from their end. And to do that, let’s take a little trip back to the ancient past: 1950.
You see, in 1950’s they had these things. Your grandparents may have mentioned them on their knitting blog. They were called LPs (or records, or phonographic discs). They were big. And here’s the thing, they were player agnostic. They didn’t care that your record player was made by Victrola, Technics, or Westinghouse, they just played.
And then along came cassettes. And cassettes were cool because you could play cassettes a lot more places then you could LPs. You sacrificed a bit of audio quality, but you could listen to your tunes in the car, while jogging, at your desk, the kitchen counter, mugging people on the subway, etc. And it was all cool because cassettes were player agnostic too. They didn’t care which Japanese manufacturer (or RCA) played you used. They just played.
And then along came CD’s. And they were cooler because you could do everything you could with cassettes (except, at first, make mix CDs; but then CD-Rs came out and moody 16 year olds everywhere rejoiced) only without the hisses and pops and poor audio quality. And they too were player agnostic, they didn’t care which Taiwanese or Korean or Sony player you used, they just played.
And then along came digital music and the mp3 format, and it was the BESTEST. THING . EVER! You could play lots and lots and lots of music on anything (cellphones, iPods, computers, keychains, robots, etc) and you could even send music digitally over the Internets (all the cool kids called it the Information Superhighway back then). For FREE. And it plays on EVERYTHING.
And then things got complicated. Because, you see, that last part about mp3s, it turns out people were not buying them from Music Companies. Not because they didn’t want to, I mean, someone had to buy the CD to make the mp3 after all. Mostly because they were poor college kids that had no money to buy a price fixed $14 CD that cost the music company $0.14 to make, and you couldn’t buy online because the Music Companies had no clue WTF this whole digital revolution thing was (they still don’t, btw, but more on that later). So the market (that’s us) did what the market does, it created a service to fill a huge unmet need.
Napster was the first and best of the filesharing services. It could have been a great cash cow for the Music Labels, but they didn’t understand it. All it was was a directory. People had music files on their machine. People wanted music files. You typed in what you wanted, and Napster connected you to all those people that had it. Nowadays it’s much more complicated, but it’s still the same in a nutshell. Of course, the problem was that the Middle Man had been cut out, and they were REALLY unhappy about it. So they shut it all down.
Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Morpheus spring up to take its place. Then Grokster, Limewire, Direct Connect, eMule, Bittorrent, etc etc etc. But the Music Labels needed some way to give people a legal way to buy music online.
And thus DRM was born (actually, it was born in 1998 when the DMCA law passed). DRM wraps your music in all sorts of restrictions that prevent you from sharing or copying your purchase, you thieving thief you. Which means it can only play a few places. Like how music bought on itunes can only play on your computer or on an iPod (and not just any iPod, only YOUR iPod). Or how your PlaysForSure can only play on your iRiver player, and not on that new iPod grandma bought you for Christmas, or those 40 Zunes you found in the dumpster behind Gamespot. And, for music that won’t play anywhere, including your own computer if the remote DRM server goes out of business, you get the added bonus of paying MORE then if you had just bought it the old fashioned way. Or you get a free computer virus/Trojan Horse on your machine! And over the past 6 years, the crappy options have grown to the point where Apple’s iTunes (which, btw, is a pretty crappy option. It reorders and moves around all your music, you can only buy at essentially radio quality, and it wraps its music in DRM to boot) has been the best least crappy option and has taken over the market. Apple has established such a dominant market position, that there’s only ONE way left to compete against them and have any chance of success.
And that brings us back to mp3s. Because, you see, mp3s without DRM play on EVERYTHING. So you can buy an mp3 music file on Amazon, and it’ll play on your computer. It’ll also play on your iPod, your Zune, your Clie, your cellphone, and even your robot dog. There’s a reason it is the preferred file format of music sharing sites since Napster. And one by one the Major Music Labels have folded, and started allowing retailers to sell their music in the mp3 format. Sony BMG was the last holdout, because Sony has always felt that your should have crippled music (they sacrificed the portable music player to Apple over it), and they’ve finally folded.
So, where are we today? We’re back at the 7th paragraph of this very long boring blog post. We’re back where we were in 1999. People like music, they like getting music online, and they like it to play on everything. The Major Labels still don’t get it, but for now they’ve been forced to see the same light was all saw back in 1999. People want music, and they’re even willing to pay for it. They don’t want DRM, and they’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it. And it only took 8 years to learn that very simple lesson.
