Music DRM and why it affects you
The music industry is at war with you, the consumer. You might not have even known you were at war, and yet, you are. The music industry as a whole, and especially the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is working to restrict your rights. Whereas before when you would buy an album, you would have a set of rights around that, the music industry is working to make it harder for that fair use to be available. The music industry is fairly unique in its position: it’s treating its consumers like criminals, for the sake of profit.
Why are they fighting this war, you might ask? It’s quite simple, actually: greed. However, there’s more to it.
The first element is format churn. How many of you own records? How about eight-tracks? How about tapes? How about CD? If you were unfortunate, you might have owned the same album on all of those. Have you heard that new super audio CDs are on the horizon? That’s right, the music industry is hoping you’ll once again upgrade your collection to the new “higher quality” audio recordings, and buy your collection again. There’s a reason for this: if you don’t re-buy your collection, then music sales stagnate, unless the music industry can constantly provide you with must have music. What’s worse, if those recordings don’t die, then older albums will never be rebought. If your father bought an album, then there’s no reason you would, right? On the other hand, if you convert music to MP3 format, then the format doesn’t degrade. This bothers the music industry.
Another element is to cut piracy. The music industry’s theory is that if music gets to MP3 form, then it will wind up on peer to peer networks, which will result in lost sales. After all, if you download an MP3, why would you buy the album? This theory would hold more weight, if music industry sales could directly show these effects through their sales. Yet, during periods when file sharing was most rampant, music sales were running at all time highs. However, I’m the first to acknowledge that correlation doesn’t imply causation. What I can offer is an anecdotal story: back in the wild peer to peer days of Napster (before it became a music service) I found that I and other people I know were buying lots of CDs. Basically, if I downloaded a song and liked it, I would go out and buy that album. At the time, I was averaging around an album a week. My (and my friends’s) purchasing habits directly correlated to how much I had actually downloaded. (Interestingly enough, my collection is currently 100% legal, and I do not trade music on peer to peer services anymore. However, I am also no where near the purchasing levels I was at back in the high days of file trading.)
The final bit is to restrict your usage rights. By buying, say, a CD, you have certain rights to what you have purchased. If you want to copy your CD for archival purposes, you have that right. If you want to make a thousand copies for your personal use, you can do that. If you want to convert it to MP3, that’s your right. These are fair use rights — they’re the same rights that let you use a VCR to record television programming. The music industry is trying to restrict these rights. They want to prevent you from being able to create MP3s, because they have no control over that format. They can’t prevent you from copying that music to your three different MP3 players. They want to make sure you can’t copy files without asking them first.
Hence, Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is the music industry’s method of trying to manage your usage. The only problem is, it restricts how you can actually use music. This is quite annoying. For example, let’s say you buy music from iTunes (arguably the least restrictive music store providing popular music). Their DRM restricts how many times you can burn a playlist to CD. Additionally, if you copy the files to another computer, you have to authorize that computer with Apple before it can play these restricted files. You are restricted to just five computers on which you can play this music at any time. Additionally, if you have hardware music players (portable MP3 players, stereo components), they have to support Apple’s DRM, or they’re unplayable. I.e., if you buy music from Apple’s iTunes music store and want to take it portably, you’ll probably have to buy an iPod. The other music services aren’t much better, providing the same style of hardware restriction, but with non-Apple hardware. That’s the rub: if you buy DRM-enabled music, you will be locking yourself into narrow hardware support. I have a Sony PSP, but there’s not a chance that it will play music bought from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. This annoys me greatly.
What’s worse is that this is not limited to just online music stores. These days, more and more CDs are being shipped with DRM software right on the CD. This is problematic, because in the least of severe cases, there will be players on which the CD won’t play, to the most severe cases, where the DRM actually hacks the user’s computer, making it less stable or vulnerable to attack. Sony BMG recently got into a lot of hot water because of this, and shows the rather strange paradox of the music industry: why are they treating the people who actually buy their music like criminals? This is very, very shortsighted, because a) the people they are affecting are legal music purchasers, and b) actual music pirates still have no problem getting music off these CDs. It’s a lose-lose situation, and the negative press Sony BMG has been garnering reiterates this fact.
So, thanks to the music industry, you now have to worry about hardware compatibility for your portable music players, getting your computer hacked because you bought a CD, and increased limitations on how you actually use the music you own. Why is any of this a good thing? Remember when if you liked a song, you would buy the album? All of the extra terms and conditions getting attached to music these days is making it a terrifying experience to actually buy music. Thanks, music industry, for making my life more difficult! How about working instead on more unique music, instead of treating your consumers like criminals? What a novel idea!
