Update: This is now confirmed. EMI is offering its entire digital music catalog via iTunes DRM-free. Songs will be $1.29 each.
Will DRM die today? In five hours we’ll find out. At 1 PM London time today EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs will hold a forty minute press conference. Lots of press were invited early this morning to attend, but no information was distributed other than “to hear about an exciting new digital offering.”
The Wall Street Journal seems to know a bit more, though. They say (behind a paywall) that the two are set to announce that a significant portion of EMI’s catalog will be sold online without any DRM. EMI is the third largest music label after Universal and Sony.
Labels like DRM because users can’t easily copy songs to give to friends. Users hate DRM because they are locked in to one device or service. Earlier this year Jobs wrote an open letter to music labels calling for them to “abolish DRMs entirely.” In that letter he noted that only 22 out of every 1,000 songs on the average iPod, or less than 3%, were purchased from iTunes. The rest were ripped from CDs and obtained illegally.
Given the plethora of illegal services for obtaining DRM-free music for free, DRM-laden online digital music sales haven’t grown fast enough to offset plummeting CD sales, which down 20% in the last year. A billion songs a month are downloaded, mostly illegally, from P2P networks.
If EMI does in fact announce that they will sell music without DRM, Jobs is going to get most or all of the credit. If sales increase, expect the other three big music labels to join as well. And April 2, 2007 will be a day music fans remember forever.
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Nope, that’s not it.
Sweet. Hopefully this is the beginning of April-1-joke-not-to-be.
/goes to check if Gmail Paper’s delivered yet.
“In that letter he noted that only 22 out of every 1,000 songs on the average iPod, or less than 3%, were purchased from iTunes. The rest were ripped from CDs and obtained illegally.”
I assume this is a typo and he meant to write “ripped from CDs OR obtained illegally”. Otherwise he’s trying to swindle us out of fair use.
/dusts off that killer google query that lifehacker posted a while ago:
perhaps apple and emi can work to further improve the advertisement of music videos. justin timberlake’s last video sold over 100,000 copies over iTunes, and though YouTube makes them widely available, JT succeeded by releasing the video early on iTunes and by making it a big “event” like Michael Jackson used to do - the music video now seems like a viable source of income for the music industry.
Speaking of Jackson, if you’re more interested in his video history, check out this post on every Michael Jackson video ever:
http://obtusity.blogspot.com/2.....ckson.html
Fingers crossed this means the end of the protection. I am not too fussed about the whole Beatles thing as we can all rip cds, but having DRM removed is a huge step. Here’s hoping.
David
http://www.MobileMarketingWatch.com
As a user, of course I support non-DRM music. Maybe this is a stupid question, but if none of the music sold has DRM on it, what prevents everyone from just copying it? Wouldn’t that obviously hurt the record companies? So while I hate DRM as a user, from the record company’s perspective I don’t understand why non-DRM would really work financially. (I’m not saying that DRM is good either, since it destroys the user experience).
It depends which portion of the catalog they make DRM free. I am more interested to see how the other major record labels react after the news breaks.
Let’s hope one of them goes one better and makes it all DRM free. I still don’t know why Jobs is pushing this so much though, if anything it’ll make iTunes lose its virtual monopoly on DRM music. He must have something up his sleeve, because that guy sure isn’t stupid.
Also @ Jon if music having non DRM was really going to hurt record companies it would have already happened. When you rip a CD onto your iTunes it isn’t protected by DRM.
Basically DRM just stops you from making unlimited copies of a file. So if I download music encoded by DRM, I might be able to put a copy onto my iPod and maybe burn a CD and thats it.
@Jon Wu
You actually said it at the end. Buying music with DRM means you get a bad user experience. That means, downloading music from illegal sources gives you a better experience over all (of course searching and downloading is more comfortable legally than illegally) than buying the music.
In my case, as I do not download music illegally, that means, that I buy a lot less music than I would like or I would without DRM. If I could get DRM free music on iTMS, I would buy CDs when I am interested. Now I only do, when I stuble upon these CDs by accident in a record store. Most of the times I have already forgotten the band name by that time.
I would personally guess, that I would approximately buy twice as many CDs when the music is completely available DRM free compared to now. Giving a copy of music to a friend is legal in my country anyway. And doing that, even with DRM is not a problem (burn Audio CD -> re-rip on friends computer). A DRM free copy of my music would most probably not generate more copies to friends than a DRM’ed copy.
Therefore I would guess offering music DRM free does work out financially for the record industry.
PS to the music industry
People who buy music are your customers. Customers are your friends, not your foes!
It will be very symbolic for music fans who are Jews: Today we celebrate the holiday of Passover which symbolizes liberation from slavery.
I guess that we’ll get the news very soon.
The whole issue is really just a matter of convince for most tech-savvy people these days. It may be possible that EMI has become convinced that inconveniencing their customers is not going to be a long term model for success.
DRM simply has bought the record labels some time to cope with their changing market and if EMI can provide the first persuasive DRM free solution to the masses (with iTunes) they will further dominate the market.
Simply put, if they make it convenient for everyone to enjoy, those billion downloads might be going through another very monetizable channel.
DRM free music for my new iPhone… might just be the deciding factor for any remaining skeptics to make the $500 plunge on real convergence device.
The Beatles will probalby be added to the ITMS (and be DRM free)
Sounds pretty good to me, at least in this case.
Major labels tend to sell the thing called DRM as a feature for the music loving fans. Well, do I have anything to add?
Regards,
René Kriest
ProBloggerWorld.de
I’m not sure DRM is going to get removed. It’s the only protection the companies have against pirates. Yes, you can burn DRM to a CD and re-rip, but…do new users know that? Do any non tech savvy users know that? Also, DRM removal is not THAT hard anyway…
Actually, I think this will to be announce the offering of the beatles on the itunes music store. Nothing to do with DRM.
Reuters UK reported yesterday that a source of theirs has said that this wont be a Beatles announcement.
Wall Street Journal: EMI plans to sell songs without anticopying software through Apple’s iTunes, marking a major strategy shift.
WOO!
Just a side thought, I cant help wondering how much powerful can one man become, Steve Jobs has now singlehandedly taken the Music industry and Hollywood to task, and when he talks the markets listen.
What would really kill me is if Jobs DOES get credit for banishing DRM, considering he’s its pioneer and primary profiteer next to the labels… if anything, he should get credit for the proliferation of DRM.
Did anyone check out mattcutts blog today.. looks like it has been hacked or is Matt giving us an April fool joke a bit too late
Stream is up here
http://w3.cantos.com/07/pjxrob.....?task=view
Looks like this actually happened!
http://www.emigroup.com/Press/2007/press18.htm
I blogged about it a little here:
http://comments.deasil.com/200.....on-itunes/
“Maybe this is a stupid question, but if none of the music sold has DRM on it, what prevents everyone from just copying it?”
Nothing. But nothing stops anyone from copying now.
Michael, I note that the sentence “If EMI does in fact announce that they will sell music without DRM, Jobs is going to get most or all of the credit” does not include the word “deserve.” Is that significant?
Yes, this comment does follow on from Chris’…
Andrew - that’s a whole different discussion. Jobs will have his place in history, although many others have been pushing for the death of DRM as well.
Jobs should get the credit because he was the only one to figure out how to convince a major label to do it with their cooperation, not force them to do it through illegal piracy. Taking the right road in this case proved to be much tougher than the brute force approach.
I think this will end badly for EMI and prove once and for all that non-DRM’d music is a horrible idea. I look forward to firing up Kazaa for all of my soon to be found EMI content!
Steve Jobs did nothing but take the opportunity to sound like the “cool guy”.. He and Apple had ample time to introduce DRM free music with independent labels and never did.
Its nice that EMI is taking a step in the right direction… but lets not give ANY credit to Apple or Steve Jobs.
Thomas - I don’t understand your attitude here.
First of all, I don’t know if it has as much to do with Steve Jobs ‘figuring’ anything out as much as it does with Apple’s position in the digital music market. Truth be told, they have much sway. Labels probably also trust that if they say they know something about the market, they probably do. (And not only that, but all that happened is that Jobs himself finally started listening to the masses of people who have been begging for DRM free music for years! It’s not like they had to do a lot of research or anything.)
Secondly, there’s absolutely no reason that this will cause a significant increase in music being availible on file-sharing sites/applications because the music was already there anyway, and very few CDs are DRM’ed CDs (i.e. rootkits or whatever type of protection they’ve come up with, and all of those have been hacked anyway).
Also, Christopher Sisk, you echo my sentiment exactly!
CD’s are still a way better deal if you buy albums, and can be encoded in whatever format you choose.
I think this move is more symbolic than anything else. Record companies already sell “non DRM” content in the form of CD’s for about the same price (in the UK, anyway.)
Of course, we should underestimate the power of symbolism and the long term effect this will have on DRM in all sectors…..
Oh, for Christ’s sake, Steve Jobs hasn’t killed DRM. DRM was stillborn. The technology is broken by design. You can’t have a system - as Cory Doctorow points out - where you give someone the lock and the key and expect it not to be broken. The whole premise is faulty. It doesn’t prevent distribution of copyrighted material. It’s just a huge waste-of-time that causes tech support headaches for users and wastes the money of those making products.
Unfortunately, this utterly useless and pointless technology will continue for a while until someone at the other record companies has a similarly logical epiphany. DRM won’t die today just as superstition never dies. However stupid the idea is, there’s always someone a teeny bit more stupid who’ll buy it.
I love how it says refreshments will be served. Is that supposed to sway your decision to go?
thanks for the tips, this is an excellent blog!
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