About this news article

Every week CDFreaks will ask industry insiders for their opinion about a hot item and of course we want to hear yours as well. This week, paying for music, is it over or not?

These days we don’t buy our idol’s albums at a record shop, we buy them online. How will this develop? Apple shows with their online iTunes shop that we don’t mind paying for music, as long as we don’t have to go outside. The days where we enjoyed an hour at a record shop are over. After discussing with the sales person, listening to a few numbers and comparing every sleeve you decided which album you bought. Now you listen to a sample and click on the ‘add to bucket’ button. A few dollars are paid from your credit card and you listen to your newest single on a portable device like an iPod.

Of course some don’t like to pay at all and they simply share their illegal versions on the web’s darker sites. Most of us have the right connection and can easily download music and movies, and if you ask why people don’t pay for music they usually blame the artists. It seems that many agree that the quality of music is bad and not worth paying for. Although this could be a factor, we see that there is a large group of people that doesn’t mind enjoying this ‘bad music’ as long as it’s free.

To protect their art and ownership publishers and copyright owners have introduced access control technologies, better known as Digital Rights Management (DRM).

DRM = Digital Rights or Restrictions Management?

In the first place there is a group that believes that their work needs to be protected against unauthorized copying. Lawyers fill their pockets because of this conception and the music industry tries their best to end our ‘copying-attitude’. Those that disagree and are anti-DRM believe that the word ‘rights’ should be traded and changed to ‘restrictions’. They believe companies are using DRM as an anti-competitive practice, and not as a copyright protector.

Uncoordinated online music industry

Many found ways to get around DRM-solutions, since there are many legal loopholes that are hard-fought by the music industry. Tunebite.com is a company that makes great use of the so-called ‘analog-hole’. Once digital information is converted to an analogue form, it is simple to digitally re-capture the analogue reproduction.

By circumventing these restrictions Tunebite.com allows you to legally remove the DRM protection. In a short interview with CDFreaks.com, Director Sales and Marketing Norman F. Foerderer, said the industry already offers a wide range of DRM-free songs. Most important is the fact that the majority of the music that was sold before was with DRM. Now the music industry has begun to lower the distribution of music without DRM. 

According to Foerderer this created a “wild and uncoordinated mixture in the worldwide markets of online music distribution”. Because the majority of the online music isn’t DRM-free it’s cheaper to buy a DRM converter like Tunebite.com, than buying your whole collection again.

But what to do when you aren’t a technological buff? Do you understand how an application like Tunebite works?

Paying? DRM is the greatest burden

Dutch entrepreneur and CEO at TargetMedia, Erwin van den Boom, believes Tunebite.com is a website for the “more advanced consumer”. With a growing market and DRM-free becoming the standard, Van Den Boom believes that there is a future for paid music downloads. But before we all run to our credit cards we have to understand DRM is probably the main reason why we currently do not all buy our music online. The Dutchman believes that there is a vast majority of people that is willing to pay for music, but simply doesn’t understand how.

Van Den Boom said that paid downloads are currently restricted to a group of early adopters, which convinced him to launch a new Dutch website last week. Downloadmusic.nl makes it simpler to pay for your downloads by directly delivering DRM-free MP3-files to the end user. This way he believes that some will find it easier to start downloading on a paid basis and others won’t be left disappointed after trying for the first time.

Discussion...

Is their a future for paid downloads, and if so, how will this develop?