Listen Up! Yahoo! Music Loses DRM
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Written By Reprise Media | July 21, 2006 | Share This
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Somewhat buried under the grim news of Yahoo!’s stock drop Wednesday was an interesting move by Yahoo! Music. They’re selling a digital version of the song “A Public Affair” for $1.99 that can be personalized using a quite a lot of different names (although none that begin with ‘Q,’ so sorry, Q*Bert).
Ok, let’s admit that this is kind of like a Jessica Simpson-ized take on those name-specific kids’ birthday party tapes, for double the price of your basic iTunes song. Which might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is Yahoo!’s stand against DRM copy protection, which cripples the usability of many commercial song files; Yahoo!’s versions of “A Public Affair” (yes, even the ones that sing to ‘Gabby’) will be DRM free. Here’s a snip from the Yahoo! Music blog:
“As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.”
We love ya, iPod - you hold a lot of music - but they’re looking at you. Yahoo!’s argument, that “Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer,” might be a hard swallow at first to folks who are used to paying only a buck for a song, but they point out that you can do a lot less with protected files. There are limits to where songs can be played and on what and how often they can be burned. As gimmicky as you might think this Jessica Simpson push is, we hope it does well enough that online music without DRM gets some traction.
Topics: Yahoo! |