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Steve Jobs and the digital rights bugaboo

He's right, the music industry is strangling itself


	Released: 02.06.07
	Source: MarketWatch
	Author: John C. Dvorak
	Original source link

Digital rights management (DRM) is an out-and-out disaster both as a concept and as an always changing technology.

Most technologists have always believed this and apparently now Steve Jobs is saying it publicly.

He is begging the music industry to give up on all the DRM initiatives while subtly predicting they may spell its doom. He is dead right.

The negative attitude over DRM is best expressed in the Wikipedia entry for DRM, "Technologies to give content providers control over redistribution and access to material. Critics of these technologies use an alternate expansion, 'Digital Restrictions Management'."

And indeed, that is exactly what this is all about -- restriction. Whereas in the 1960s if you bought a 45 R.P.M. top 40 hit you could play it on any record player. You could take it to parties and play it. You could play it at the school dance. You could copy it to your tape recorder even.

In today's world of digital content, especially music, downloaded music tends to be restricted to the point where moving the music from device to device (despite perceived personal ownership) can be made impossible.

Many people believe this is stifling the industry since there is no common social nexus of sharing. If my iPOD is full of my songs I cannot necessarily burn them onto a CD which can be mixed up with my friends CD's so a new creation can be made that would be the best-of-the best. This best-of-the best would then be analyzed by the group in a social environment to determine trends and favorite new bands and music styles to seek out.

People seem to forget the social mechanism involved with the popularity of music in general. It's forgotten as a mechanism by the old farts who don't care any more and that seems to include the people (beancounters and lawyers) who run record labels.

Music sharing used to be a common thing people did, but it's now limited to swapping CD's (or copies of CD's). As we move to pure online distribution the sharing of purchased music is severely limited by DRM.

This limitation will kill the industry since the social networking (aka music sharing) has been so important to the discovery process.

Piracy is the big fear amongst these folks, but piracy is a complex mechanism and most people would rather go to a record store and buy something. It's actually cheaper to buy something if your time is worth anything at all.

But you still need the social mechanism to discover new songs thus many kids are flocking to so-called "Indy" (for independent) labels that do not implement DRM and encourage sharing as a marketing concept.

This may be part of Jobs' concern. There are a lot of bands out there and they are giving away a lot of unrestricted material openly on the Internet. If this becomes a trend (which may have already begun) then where does that leave the big labels and the Apple iTunes store? Languishing, that's where.

Jobs is no idiot and after already proving that selling music online is a money-maker you'd think the big labels would pay some attention to him when he tells them to get off this DRM nonsense.

Of course they will pay no attention whatsoever.

I would like to finish with the marketing observation that the record industry hates. During the heyday of Napster and open free music sharing and trading, when million of people swapped songs, the CD business was booming. Once Napster was shut down, and along with it the social network of music discovery, sales began to plummet. They are still falling.

Apparently these people are clueless about their own industry and how it works.

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