The End of DRM
Well that’s that then. Like many others I’ve been arguing since this blog’s inception that DRM is one of the biggest factors holding back online media sales. When Steve Jobs proclaimed his opposition to DRM a couple of months ago, I believed him while skeptics put it down to a ploy. After all, everyone knows that without DRM, artists will starve, creativity will die, the sun will set never to rise again, and we’ll spend the rest of our existence listening to Englebert Humperdinck and watching Happy Days reruns.
The only problem with this doomsday scenario is that Apple and EMI announced today that the latter will henceforth be selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes. The price is higher than that of protected tracks by 30% (and higher than it should be, in my opinion, by about 75%) but this is a monumental step in the right direction. Jobs apparently expects that half of tracks sold will be DRM-free by the end of the year. My prediction: the uninfected tracks will sell so much better than the others that we will begin to witness a slow but steady shift to DRM-free content, not just in the music world but for all digital media.
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