Apple and EMI Partner To Provide Non-DRM’d Music

By Daniel Miessler on April 2nd, 2007: Tagged as Apple | DRM | Music | Technology

This is big. Here are the highlights:

  1. EMI’s entire library available from iTunes without DRM
  2. Songs are far higher quality, at 256 kbps AAC
  3. The songs cost a bit more at $1.29 each
I am highly enthused about this, and I’ll definitely be making all future purchases in this format. I do worry about piracy, though. I’ll find it hard to be angry at EMI, for example, if within a month of starting this there are a thousand free, ad-driven sites where you can download entire albums from their library (with album art) — all without DRM.

At that point, what’s the incentive to purchase? Once the word gets out there’ll be tens of thousands of these sites out there. Just another case of a few ruining it for the many. It’s hard to do the right thing in the world we live in; it often results in a swift poke in the eye.

Hell, even the highly moral will be inclined to cheat once in a while. If you just spent $300 dollars on music in the new, expensive format and another couple of albums show up on some newsgroup or bittorrent site, it’s going to be awfully easy to say, “Hmm, I’ll just gank these two…and pay for some more when I get paid again…”

Here are my predictions:

  • 10% will buy EVERYTHING and avoid the temptation to steal anything.
  • 25% will buy as much as they can afford and steal a good portion of the rest.
  • 40% will steal most of what they want and occasionally buy something out of guilt.
  • 25% will just steal and not buy anything. Most will feel bad about it but still do it anyway.
Oh well, I hope it ends up being positive for the record companies. I want to see this model succeed. [ Just for the record, I'm the good DRM (Daniel Richard Miessler). Yeah, DRM really are my initials. ]





--



4 Comments »

  1. I think you’re overly pessimistic. For a long time there’s been piracy sites out there. DRM didn’t stop people from putting things out there, so the lack of DRM shouldn’t affect it. 90% of all music is sold DRM-free in much higher quality on CDs. Why making a percentage of a minority of the Music DRM free make a difference?

    Comment by Icelander — 4/2/2007 @ 2:45 pm

  2. The effort involved in ripping thousands of CDs and then posting them to the Internet is much greater than simply downloading once and redistributing the content. That’s the danger here: only one person has to do it and the stuff is then propagated.

    And in the past there have been issues with quality. Now, because of iTunes, we’ll have perfect quality, perfect metadata, and probably even album art floating around everywhere. I’m not completely sure this will become rampant and cause harm to the model, but I am worried about the possibility.

    Comment by Daniel Miessler — 4/2/2007 @ 3:07 pm

  3. Rip-once and then distribute has been the way it’s always done. Getting the content from iTunes instead of CD seems like it might be a convenience issue but a CD is still a better source medium.

    There isn’t any music that is available in the iTunes store that you can’t currently find on Bittorrent or the P2P networks so I doubt this will affect pirates at all.

    The interesting thing about this is that they will be able to estimate how much pirated content originates from the iTunes store. Nearly all pirated music is currently in MP3 format. I would imagine the pirates would not bother to transcode the AAC files into MP3 before distributing due to data loss and the hassle.

    Either way, I’m not sure this is going to change anything. I think we need a change in copyright laws, a more flexible and open distribution method, and more customer involvement to really revitalize the industry.

    Comment by Matt — 4/2/2007 @ 4:08 pm

  4. I agree with the change, especially with DRM. I usually wait for TV shows to come out on DVD,.I am an obsessive collector and I love serial type shows. When I started downloading shows from iTunes I was quite happy. I mean I can watch serial shows like Battlestar and Heroes and not miss anything, plus skip the commercials.

    Then I tried to move the 20 episodes I just purchased onto a DVD to watch on my player that will play AVIs, DiVX, etc and I am unable to do so because of DRM. Not only that, but I can only transfer the files to a few harddrives, ever. Now that is not something I think should happen if I pay for the shows. I should be able to watch them on my TV. This seems to me that more people will pirate the TV shows instead of purchasing them since most of us don’t connect a PC to our TVs. I don’t know, I think this had the reverse effect. I will be getting the DVDs.

    Way to go Apple, you just lost all my iTunes Store business.

    Comment by Eamon Landon — 4/2/2007 @ 5:22 pm

RSS Feed For This Post...
This Post's TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment...