The Butt Ugly Weblog

DRM is dead?

Not quite. But if someone tells you that DRM is necessary for online music stores, you can now point out to them that the last bastion of DRM, Sony BMG, has now decided to sell DRM-free music. Nobody is of course very surprised by this - the problems associated with DRM make it difficult for even computer-savvy people to cope with.

However, the DRM-free music is available through Amazon, and they sell it only to the US. Thanks to the system where you have to license music separately for each country, the rest of the world is pretty much still screwed.

It is an interesting question how much of the Apple's DRM strategy was actually behind this: the only way to sell music to iPods (which are the most common form of MP3 players out there) is to either sell music via iTunes (because the iPod DRM is proprietary to Apple), or to sell it DRM-free. This means that if some other form of media players gains dominance (say, cell phones), DRM might just make a comeback. EU has been asking for an open DRM standard for years now, and Microsoft is pretty liberal about their licensing of the Windows Media DRM.

On the other hand, once you start selling unencumbered music to consumers, it may be rather difficult to start selling them DRM-encumbered music later on again...