TechWag

Yahoo looking at Amazon’s ability to sell MP3’s that can be played anywhere on any device and decides that the great experiment with DRM should be declared a loss, and to call it a day. While ITunes offers a limited supply of non-DRM music, Amazon has gone the whole way, and without some major price jack in the process. A non-DRM track should cost less, there is less in the way of software surrounding it. It is a lot like charging more for unleaded gas; it doesn’t have all the stuff that regular gas has.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet. Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong. Source: Fistfulayen.com

With bands starting to go independent like Nine Inch Nails and Radio Head, it makes sense for the companies that are selling music on the internet be able to compete. The music industry has not been busy developing a good relationship with its users, or its buyers, or bands. The internet has been a radically disruptive technology for RIAA and its minions, as well as the major labels. All of them are wrapped up in a process that not only kills trust, they have aliened their users. There has been more than one “I am not buying music again” manifesto.

This is where the industry gets interesting, the defection of bands from the labels and going independent, the advent of MySpace, Garage band and others to delivery MP3 music of starting off bands, Amazon moving away from DRM, Yahoo stating that DRM should die, and ITunes carrying non-DRM’d files, the end of the whole process is suffering from mass defections.

Add to that, the idea that as companies drop selling of digital files, those DRM certificates go away, and customers are left with a dead file that is essentially valueless. This one makes more sense, and we hope that the bigger companies can succeed where the smaller companies have been unable to sway big music.

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