Music for All: Sony BMG Breaks MP3 Rules
Okay, there was no cheer. But the rest of it is very accurate.
Yahoo Music Rivals Competition
With the release of A Public Affair, Yahoo did something no other competitor has done: made the music available to work on any player. That’s right – you can get your nifty little copy of Jessica Simpson’s song with your own name threaded into it, and you can play it on your computer, your iPod, or an MP3 player by Creative, Samsung, etc. No matter what player you have, you can play this song.
Seriously, this is a first.
Up to now, major record labels have refused to sell music unless it was bundled with digital rights management (DRM). Independent labels wanting to gain some extra exposure slipped right under DRM, selling with the music service no one saw coming – eMusic. Providing unprotected MP3s has been eMusic’s strategy from day one, and they currently step on iTune’s toes as their popularity continues to rise.
For some time, Yahoo Music has been calling for the major labels to follow eMusic’s lead, widening the digital music market. Ian Rogers, the person behind Yahoo’s music store, reiterated their case in the Yahoo Music Blog, “Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day – the Compact Disc) or consumer. The only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.”
By making the music usable in any player, Yahoo hopes to add just that value – to the artist, label, and consumer.
Why You Shouldn’t Hold Your Breath
While digital music services like Yahoo Music and eMusic are firmly behind the cause of DRM-free versions of music, the recording industry couldn’t be further from agreement. Yahoo pushes for better playability, and the recording industry pushes for increased DRM to prevent piracy.
Tod Cohen, a former exect at EMI Music, did admit that competitors will be watching how A Public Affair does. Everyone else can stand in the background, watch from the bleachers, and determine how interested consumers will be. He did have a warning, though, “If anybody thinks DRM will be gone in six months, well, that’s not about to happen.”
What it amounts to is money. Apple iTunes, for example, can guarantee a steady income because their songs work on the ever-popular iPod. If you don’t yet own one of the super-expensive-tiny-pieces-of-electronics, though, you can’t get music from iTunes to work. So, you’ll either go to the website run by the company you purchased your player from and spend even more money with them downloading digital music, or you’ll give in and buy an iPod.
Without DRM, companies wouldn’t be able to get away with it. If you could download the same song at a different website directly to your iPod and it cost a few cents less, you probably would, right? Or, let’s look at it this way: you can download a song for a few cents more at a website, and play it on any music player in your house.
In February, Dave Goldberg, Yahoo’s vice president and the general manager of music, made an appeal to record company executives. He asked that they reconsider their insistence on DRM. And while their move with Jessica Simpson and Sony BMG is a major step in that direction, even Yahoo hasn’t released plans to expand DRM-free offerings. It doesn’t, after all, come directly down to them … they have to get an entire industry on board, and that may be a larger order than Yahoo can handle.
