A busy day for arguments about DRM and the music business generally:
Robert Scoble puts the case(about half-way down the post) for Micro$oft’s WMA – which basically sums up as “buy into our technology because we’re going to have the market share” (or alternatively, “we’re monopolistic bastards who are going to stomp all over any potential rivals with a variety of interesting and barely-legal maneuvers, so buy into us now to prevent disappointment later”).
Then Cory Doctorow responds with the case for open standards.
Of the two, it seems like Doctorow has the more persuasive argument – Scoble’s position ignores the fact that rights restrictions might not necessarily be a given. It’s a problem of seeing the wood for the trees – I’ve given up using a CD player in favour of my laptop, particularly when I’m working at home. Today I dug out a Peter Gabriel CD which I hadn’t listened to in ages, and it wouldn’t work in either iTunes or Musicmatch. I wasn’t going to rip it, or share it, or in any other way do anything illegal or immoral – but because Mr Gabriel (or his record label) is both paranoid and short-sighted, I couldn’t listen to my legally-held copy that I’d legally obtained with my own money. Which pissed me off immensely, and has scratched Peter Gabriel from the list of artists that I’m prepared to buy again.
Contrast that with Ehren Starks who flogs his wares through Magnatune. I listened to some of his recordings online, I liked one or two of them, so I laid out $8 on an MP3 download and they’re now sitting in my iTunes playlist. When the time comes, I’ll be able to download them onto an iPod, or burn them onto a CD, and generally do what the hell I like with them – except for uploading them onto a file-sharing network. I might, conceiveably, lend them to a friend (or in reality, give a friend a copy). That friend may then themselves go off and buy an Ehren Starks album, or they may just carry on listening to a “pirate” version. But either way, Ehren Starks is 100% more likely to make an incremental sale than if the download was crippled and tied to my laptop, or my iPod, or a designated number of CD burns. And he hasn’t got the multi-million dollar marketing budget of Peter Gabriel, so about the only way he’s going to get any form of exposure is through word of mouth from people like me.
Which of course is exactly what the major content providers are terrified about. There’s no money to be made for them out of artists like Ehren Stark – too niche, too low-key, too not-likely-to-generate-Pepsi-promotional-tieins. It’s the Peter Gabriels of the industry that have the scale for that. And suddenly the cosy controlled world of the physical distribution-based industry breaks down, because now my discretionary-spending CD dollars are being spread across hundreds of smaller-scale artists instead of one or two major ones.
The available technology has suddenly disrupted the industry, and that can’t be an easy situation to deal with if you’re used to one way of looking at the world which has always worked for you. But what really pisses me off about the response of the content industry is that the answer appears to be reducing my rights to do what the hell I like – legally – with my property, in the hope of propping up a business model that has come to the end of it’s natural life.
So the argument about “which DRM should you lock yourself into” is actually premature – it seems to assume that the debate has taken place already. I’m still asking the question “why should I be locked into a technology that reduces my legitimate fair-use rights?” The danger is that if that question isn’t asked in place of Scoble’s “which flavour of DRM would Sir like with his download”, then that debate isn’t going to happen and the rights will be gone before we’ve noticed.
