Where the music industry leads….
Today Apple & EMI announced the beginning of the end for DRM in the music industry, as reported by Techcrunch.
Following on from Steve Jobs’ call earlier in the year for the end of DRM which restricts the distribution of downloaded music tracks. In this joint announcement from Apple & EMI they say that non-DRM protected downloads will cost $0.30 more than their protected equivalents, which will be still available, but will be encoded at twice the bit rate so they will be of better quality.
You will even be able to upgrade previously downloaded tracks at $0.30 a time.
So once the giant oil tanker that is the music industry starts to turn will others follow. As I discussed earlier onerous DRM software and conditions are getting in the way of providing information to the people that need/want it.
EMI appear to be the first that has woken up to realise that you cannot fight an inevitability, and it is in their interest to change their business model to suit the new realities. The question is, when will the others in the online media [including journal supply] world realise that King Canute could not stop the tide, and there is no reason to believe that they can either.
(King Canute and the seashore image from Fifty Famous Stories Retold, by James Baldwin - Project Gutenbberg)
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