Despite MP3 being the leading audio format for portable digital music players, up until now the big labels have stayed clear of it as a format for selling its music simply because they cannot control what consumers may do with their purchased music. So to be on the safe side, they effectively treat everyone as criminals by locking up their music with DRM. While in theory consumers should never need to make more than a limited number of personal copies, play on more than a few players and so on, in practice DRM has been abused in that consumers need to have a DRM-compliant player compatible with the store they are buying from or only buy music from a store that is compatible with their player. DRM also limits portability of the music and may even cease to play should the licenses go missing (such as after a major crash with no backup) and the online store closes down.
Yahoo is set to offer for the first time a song by the record label Epic in the unrestricted MP3 format after striking a one-time deal with Epic. The song title is Jessica Simpson's latest popular single - "A Public Affair". While the online music store Emusic already offers all of its tracks in the MP3 format, this will be the first time a song from a larger label will be offered in an uncrippled format from a well known music service. The song will be playable on virtually any portable music player on the market, including the iPod series.
This song is available for $2, twice that of a typical individual DRM track purchase. However, this high price is the mainly result of the name mentioned in the lyrics being customisable with a choice of several dozen names. Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music reckons that the price of music free of DRM should be priced between $1 and $2. He also went on to mention that Yahoo has been publicly trying to get the labels to sell music in the MP3 format for a good while now as DRM has nothing to offer for the Artist, the Consumer or even the labels who have already offered DRM-free music on CDs since they first launched.
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On Wednesday Yahoo Music announced it is selling Jessica Simpson's latest single, "A Public Affair," as an MP3 with no digital rights management (DRM) technology. That means the tracks will play on any device and can be copied any number of times, including on CDs. The offer is a major break from how most music downloads are sold today. For example, tracks purchased through Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and RealNetworks Rhapsody service include DRM locks that prevent songs from playing on some devices, and limit the number of copies consumers are allowed to make. |
It would be nice if Epic (or other music labels) would have been able to offer a handful of titles to trial in the MP3 format as this customisable song will not really give a good comparison against how well it does as a DRM crippled download if there are so many versions of the same song with different person's names mentioned in the lyrics available. In fact, no matter how much the music industry claims that music will not sell in an uncrippled format, they should have a good look at the AllOfMP3 service they are trying to bring down. Even if the site is not paying the artists for the songs they sell, the site very clearly shows that consumers are willing to buy music in uncrippled music formats even if it can be shared, downloaded and copied and the BPI has already found the site to be the next top performing after iTunes in the UK.
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Source: Wired News
