This week, Apple announced that Digital Rights Management (DRM) would not attach to any single song from the iTunes store. This is huge confirmation of what most music fans have noticed: DRM doesn’t work and may never work. The details of this change include a price change. A tiered spectrum of prices will be the tariff card with the most ‘popular’ (read: hot and new) costing $1.29; the usual .99 cents for the chestnuts and perennial favorites; and then .69 cents for the sentimental and slow demand ones.

That music downloaded necessarily involves a ‘codec’ (which means that only a fraction of the full fidelity is made available) seems to continue to elude the consumer. But as anyone who has tried to play iTunes music on a full fidelity, fancy speaker knows, the quality of music is definitely strained…. and thin sounding.

For those of us who have been watching the DRM life cycle over the last decade, this is more confirmation that technological control efforts have far less to do with piracy than with an effort to control the design of consumer electronics, digital broadcasting and the evolving distribution models. Content owners are about out of tricks for how to slice and dice the accessing of content (regional codes, restrictions on porting lawfully made copies and pricing).

This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.