Sound Off: DRM
One of the biggest debates in today’s music industry is the debate of Digital Rights Management: The practice of putting restrictions onto your music that states what you can and can’t do with a song. If you’ve bought a song from the iTunes Store or subscribe to a music service, you’ve most likely bought a song with DRM on it. While Apple has introduced iTunes Plus: Songs without DRM and at a higher quality bitrate (256k vs. 128k), it hasn’t reached all of their songs and shows no sign of reaching all the songs any time soon.
I am generally Anti-DRM, but am a fan of an all-in-one solution, which iTunes is. Amazon offers an MP3 library full of non-DRM MP3 songs and Rhapsody now has a DRM-free store, but neither are one-click with the iPod. I would love to see every piece of content go DRM-free, but it just won’t happen with the current setup the RIAA and the MPAA are setup in.
So, are you pro-DRM or anti-DRM? Sound off in the comments below.
Tags: Digital Rights Management, DRMRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Sound Off
3 opinions for Sound Off: DRM
Petar
Jul 18, 2008 at 5:08 am
please let DRM die soon
Ana
Jul 18, 2008 at 9:41 am
Anti-DRM! I’m hugely in favor of the changes that have begun in the music industry. And that is coping with the rise in digital technology by changing their business models.
There’s still money to be made out there, without restricting song usage. The music industry is just slow to change.
Bruno Carriere
Aug 2, 2008 at 11:29 am
Is anyone out there still really for DRM? It’s bad for everyone.
As a small label we held up going digital until iTunes came up with iTunes+. It just doesn’t make sense that music bought digitally would be MORE restricted than music bought on CD. The main appeal of digital formats is ease of distribution and flexibility and with DRM, you lose all of that.
Now as soon as lossless compression becomes ubiquitous the ‘audio quality’ problem will be put to rest.
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