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DRM SUCKS
Okay… Conceptually I understand the implications of DRM to me, the music fan. Working for a new generation of music company, I rip on it constantly. But the truth is, it has never really affected me personally – until tonight. I’m going to the India Arie concert at The Mountain Winery this upcoming Tues night (invited by cute boy – nice!) and wanted to know her music better. I went to iTunes and purchased her latest album – and since Sonos is the way I play music through my house, I clicked on “update music library” in my Sonos system, so it would update with my new iTunes purchase. My new India Arie album wouldn’t show up. I had friends coming in 30 minutes for dinner so I got back to preparing food. Then back to the computer to try again. Still nothing. I had no idea what was going on. It didn’t make sense. I mentioned to my friends over dinner my frustration for something that made no sense since my music library updated just fine that morning when I was rebooting my entire network and re-setting up my Sonos system with a network expert. One friend mentioned she’d had trouble with something on iTunes before so I thought that might be it, but checked that out – and still nothing. So, I’m pretty puzzled and fuzzy from all the yummy wine tonight – enough to want to go to sleep – but even more than that, I’m so bothered by this being unresolved, so I keep trying….What’s up? I WANT to hear this music that I purchased. So, totally unlike me, I went to the support pages on the Sonos site and started reading the FAQ (ONLY because it is after support hours – normally I hate reading to troubleshoot technical stuff and I’ll just look for someone to tell me what to do or tell me WHY...), but immediately I see this thing about iTunes and DRM…. and Sonos not reading music with DRM. That’s it???!! I immediately burned the music to my very last blank CD and re-uploaded it… and what do you know… now it shows up in my Sonos library! THAT IS SO ANNOYING…… and RIDCULOUS…. all that time and inconvenience and brainpuzzle just to play music in my own home that I purchased this afternoon. I find myself wondering how I could have not run into this before… I guess I’m still old-school – buying CD’s and importing them to iTunes - and the rest of my music has been purchased on Fuzz (DRM-free) so it’s not an issue. It's one thing to preach about something that you know makes no sense (for plenty of reasons), and I do it all the time, but it’s a whole new story to really EXPERIENCE it…. DRM SUCKS!
Comments
It makes no sense whatsoever to drive the growth on an industry on the basis of what you can't do with your music rather than all the great things you can do with it. Crazy business practices will eventually go where they belong, to the nut house of failed businesses.
I read a bit in an article a good while ago (my apologies for not being able to recall the source) about an Ivy League economics professor who gave this great demonstration about demand in one of his undergrad classes. Prior to the class time, he loaded the pockets of his jacket with chocolate bars. During the course of his lecture would suddenly produce one and offer to sell it to anyone in the hall for a given price. Someone would invariably buy it for the asking price (this must have been a midday class, it would work best when students needed a jolt to stay awake). He would then talk some more, and would offer up another bar. The kids wouldn't go for it,t and he would have to lower the price to get rid of it, and so on.
The point is that the relationship between supply and demand has a definite effect on price. This principle is operative in the technology arena as well. Like CapitalClinic says, this DRM thing may disappear because, while it was once invaluable to some customers, it now inhibits consumers (loathsome term) of music who have access to more flexible technologies. If the DRM people (whoever they may be) are interested in surviving like the rest of us, they'll roll with the new - like the rest of us. If they're smart, they've been anticipating this whole chain of events and are preparing for things like...fuzz.com.