DRM is Killing the Music Industry
As Carlo Longino so eloquently put it, Digital Rights Management is going to kill the music industry. Well, he said it will kill mobile music, but the dynamics are the same for the music industry at large and he's right on. DRM accomplishes exactly opposite of it's intended purpose. DRM restrictions punish the honest customer who buys the music and creates a demand for non-DRM versions of the music to be file swapped. Since when does a company become successful by saying, "Hey, we're going to give you less and still charge you the same price."? Well, given gas prices lately, maybe that's a winning strategy, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to work anywhere else.
I purchased a CD back in 1985 or so. That CD has increased in value to me over the years. Unlike before where all I could do was play the CD on my stereo, when I put that CD in my computer now, the names of the tracks are automatically looked up off of the Internet and displayed. Then I can click "import" on iTunes and pop the contents of the CD onto my iPod and listen to the music as I go for a run. The value I get out of that CD is much more to me now than it was back in 1985.
Now let's look at the DVD, a medium that has always had DRM. That movie I purchased back in 1997 can still only do the same things it could when I first got it. If I want to watch a movie on my laptop on a long airplane flight, I have to bring an extra battery because spinning that DVD in my laptop is going to absolutely kill my batteries. I would much rather be able to rip the DVD onto the hard drive because hard drives are far more power efficient. Add to that the fact that files on my hard drive are far more convenient than lugging a stack of DVD cases around. I'm not getting anymore value out of the DVDs I have purchased.
So which is better in the long term? I would take the unencumbered CD any day.
You could argue that CDs can have DRM and still be made to be playable on my iPod. Yes, this is technically possible, but I have an MP3 player in the dash of my car that I also want to use. It happens to be Linux based, so the DRM would have to be some proprietary module for that. I should be able to play my music in my car, right? The point is a company can never foresee every way I want to legitimately listen to my music. It would be a never ending game of "whack-a-mole" that the record companies wouldn't be incented to play.
The threat of piracy isn't new either. The software industry has dealt with this issue for at least the past 25 years. Most software companies do a minimum effort to stop piracy. They require a serial number to be entered for software to be unlocked. Do you know how easy it is for someone to publish a serial number on the web somewhere? Yet the software industry is alive and well. Some have argued that without piracy, the software industry wouldn't be what it is today because it would have lacked the early widespread exposure piracy afforded it. Regardless of that argument, the software companies have found it more economically viable to build great software than to build overly restrictive rights management architectures. Shouldn't the music industry take a page from the software business that has "been there and done that" already?
Notice that Apple doesn't want DRM, the record companies are the ones that demanded it of them. Unfortunately I have seen the controls every tightening around me. First I could share my music to an unlimited number of people on my local network with iTunes. Then I could only share it to five people. Then I could only share it for 24 hours or some such. What's next on that one? Complete restriction isn't far away.
My advice for the music industry is simple. No DRM is uncrackable, so just forget about it and concentrate on making better music. Given a good unencumbered legal avenue, people will pay for their music. Going after every little infraction is not a scalable business model. Pirates will steal software, but Microsoft is still able to make a pile of money. Pirates will steal music, so why can't the music industry handle it? Put a "you can go to jail for stealing this" label on your music, include the MP3 versions ready-made so I don't have to wait for the CD to import and give the customer what they want.
The first record company to ignore DRM and give the consumers what they are demanding is going to win the market.
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