DRM on the way out?

In a joint press conference yesterday EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that EMI will offer all songs from its digital catalog(sic) without DRM.

These songs will no longer be tied to iTunes and the iPod.

Songs will be encoded at 256kbps AAC (current is 128kbps) and sold at $1.29 per song, $0.30 more per song than the current price.

Check out Tech crunch for more details.

This is a significant shift in the music industry.

Legal downloading has become very popular but the final bugbear has been the DRM - From the point of view of the publishers this is there to stop people buying stuff and then pirating it (which is a strange notion as the drive to piracy is normally about attaining free stuff), which seems fair I guess on paper, but what it has meant in practice is that the end user has had problems in replicating their previous CD based experience which would allow them to 'move' the music around to where ever they wanted to listen to it. This is what US law calls 'fair use'.

So if buying a legal download offerers the 'convenience' of an easy to use and well stocked repository coupled with a convince of usage
then the compulsion to use piracy methods is greatly reduced and the legal service wins out.

There is, I suspect a large difference between the understanding of the economics of piracy by the publishers and how they talk about it in public. For instance they know a certain amount of piracy is inevitable and they also know that a certain amount is beneficial - There are many albums I have bought simply because I've been introduced to a band when I friend copied me a CD and said 'You have to listen to this' - music taste spreads virally and low level piracy is crucial to this.

Also if a music publisher finds a 13 year old kid with 500,000 pirate songs on his computer they know that despite the fact that they will start a legal claim at the rate of $1 per song, that kid never had the disposable income to spend £0.5m on music - that the sum total of pirate songs does not reflect a true opportunity cost or loss of earnings.
What the publishers have in fact been doing (with some success) is trying to shift public opinion back to the same position as it took on the large scale piracy of CDs, Tapes etc. Remember when 'Home Taping' killed music back in the 80s?

Of course, a cynic may suggest that the killing of DRM was the plan all along and the whole adventure has been an exercise in unleashing a 'product' at an introductory price and then bumping it up, once a market has been established, with the promise of new features - i.e. the ability for fair use and greater quality.

It is important to remember that the 'standard' for the encoding bit rate for MP3 emerged in the dark times of dial up access - sure it is broadband which popularized its use and made mass sales (and mass piracy for that matter) practical, but I always had a problem with the generally poor sound quality of MP3 compared to source CD.
I'm no HiFi buff and would always prefer a decent song with lower fidelity than a perfectly sounding but soulless tune. However, even my ears which have spent much of the last 20 years in front of stacks of very loud speakers could detect the warbling and lack of clarity that excessive compression delivers.
Incidentally, why is it often the people with the best HiFi set ups who have the worst music collections?
But now the rapid delivery mechanism of broadband is ubiquitous and the notions of keeping files sizes small are also an anachronism as storage costs plummet.
So the EMI and Apple announcement probably says more about the state of the art of technology and the 'sensible' quality and size parameters for music files than the model for selling music in the digital space. In fact, many people have resisted using services like iTunes because the file quality is so poor in comparison to what is possible.

Personally, although I listen to music mostly on an iPod, PC or via my home media server, I still tend to mostly buy CDs rather than digital download - I like the packaging and the durability. If you are the same I'll pimp my friends Sleevenotez service once again.
Though, the biggest problem I have with legal download catalogs is that there are big wholes in them which coincide with my music tastes - Digital purchasing really should remove the barriers to the provision of back catalogue, but still the publishers continue with their policy of 'shaping taste' by 'limiting' availability - long tail anyone? Why can I still not buy the early Dogs D'Amour albums online?

For the record, Grinn and Monty Dogg records are perfectly happy for you to rip and distribute anything we publish. We just ask that you don't make money from it or claim it as your own!
Incidentally, you can get the entire Grinn back catalogue here for free.

So, all in all the Sony/Apple announcement it a very interesting and welcome step towards recombining the music industry's services and user expectations - lets hope this becomes the model rather than a failed experiment.