Will the Loss of DRM Confuse Customers?
By Jimmy Guterman - Mon 16 Apr 2007 06:10 AM PST
Billboard has a counterintuitive piece on EMI’s decision to let iTunes and other stores sell its music sans DRM. The new downloads will be more expensive than individual tracks are now on iTunes ($1.29 rather than 99 cents), but they will also have higher sound quality and, of course, not be encumbered by copy protections. Brian Garrity argues that “the introduction of these downloads is coming at the expense of the initial clarity of the iTunes message. In fact, Apple is creating new marketing and messaging challenges for itself.” Garrity lines up experts to question whether this gives consumers better value. The most pungent critic, Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, contend that “consumers actually are getting a raw deal by being charged a 30 percent premium to effectively buy back their rights. And while audio quality is improved, it still doesn’t match CD quality.” And Garrity concludes, ominously and smartly: “For an industry that needs its digital business to offset a slumping CD market, down 20 percent year to date, it’s hard to reason that higher-priced digital offers will help accelerate consumer adoption.”
These are all good points, but none of them are new. The “initial clarity of the iTunes message” that Garrity invokes never existed. It was never a simple 99-cents-per-song/$9.99-per-album deal. iTunes has allowed majors to price selected albums at $11.99 for at least three years, and many longer songs are not available for individual purchase in the store, only as part of the full album. Convoluted rights schemes have left customers unsure whether they’ll even have access to every song on an album, especially compilations. Eckersley’s observations are spot on (early adopters get the shaft), but this is a time at which an industry in danger of disappearing has to experiment early and often. Perhaps innovation will turn out to be more effective than litigation.
Posted in: Entertainment, Music, Legal, DRM
