EMI Says ITMS DRM-Free Music Selling Well 239
An anonymous reader writes "'The initial results of DRM-free music are good' says Lauren Berkowitz, a senior vice president of EMI, at a music industry conference in New York. Berkowitz went on to say that the early results from iTunes indicate that DRM-free offerings may boost revenue from digital albums as well as individual songs."
Re:Shock! (Score:1, Informative)
Some people seem to believe that they are encrypted into the music somehow, but it's been confirmed that this is not the case.
Re:Of Course It Is..... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
Watermarking is not DRM. It's watermarking. DRM controls when and how you are allowed to use the content, and watermarking does not. It only provides a [potential] trail of culpability. If you are modded down, it will be at least half because you are simply wrong - although I have been hit hard by fanboys as well, Apple and otherwise. Right now it's the OSI fanboys modding me down for pointing out that Perens' claim to invent the idea of "open" source is false and that "open" meant something before he opened his mouth on the subject. I suspect you suffer for the same reason I do; some people mod me down any chance they get to make a plausible-looking negative moderation, simply because they recognize me and disapprove of that for which I stand.
Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
Re:With sales tax it's a buck-fifty !! (Score:2, Informative)
FLAC takes less CPU to decode than MP3, AAC, WavePak, or Vorbis.
Re:Shock! (Score:5, Informative)
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
Re:With sales tax it's a buck-fifty !! (Score:3, Informative)
Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it.
Do you think that photo sites should get rid of JPEGs and replace them with uncompressed TIFFs, too? I think that JPEG at the 99% quality setting is a fair comparison to AAC 256 kbps.
Re:Shock! (Score:4, Informative)
The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks, should you need to. If you don't need to, and you think having your name stored on your hard drive is somehow an infringement of your civil liberties, then just remove them. They're stored in standard MPEG-4 atoms, and there are a number of tools for editing them.
Re:DMCA is only reason DRM-Free is not music suici (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Double Shock! (Score:3, Informative)
If you make a one-off embedded controller for a particular purpose and you expect to sell 10 annually, reducing your price will definitely reduce your profits.
They will (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't have any songs that were DRM free at launch of iTunes+, but just recently two came up as upgradeable.
Re:Shock! (Score:3, Informative)
And it's a good thing we don't come to you to give the final say on such matters. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Your rights are not being managed--at all. You can do what you wish with the file. Another point: technically, when you strip DRM from normal iTunes songs, because it relies on an encryption mechanism, you're in theory, violating the DMCA. There's no encryption with the files being tagged as they are in the non-DRM version. Go to the console and type 'strings FILENAME' and voila, it dumps these so-called watermarks. If you want to put these on Bit Torrent, or some P2P network, fine. No one is stopping you. No one is stopping you from easily stripping the tags, either. Calling it DRM just makes you look completely ignorant on the subject.
Re:Spiltting hairs (Score:4, Informative)
Watermarking means no such thing.
Watermarks were used in drafts, demos, and other such things, partly to identify them as such and partly to prevent someone from stealing it. e.g. if you hired a design firm to create a poster for you they might send you a watermarked draft so that you could see the finished result, but if you decided not to pay for it, the poster was still useless because it had a giant watermark through the middle that said 'draft copy - property of design company'. Once you'd approved and paid, they'd send you an un-watermarked version for you to reproduce.
Watermwarks were also used in coporate letterhead, cheques, and other docuements to help prevent forgery and authenticate that they were genuine. For the most part this was just used to help foil attacks. The same way most banks.
Never to uniquely identify individual documents.
but I would still argue in the shift to the digital domain the meaning is more of uniqueness than ability to remove
Again not true. With the digital transition, the primary motivation for watermarks was, as before, to 'damage' files so that people could see images but not steal them due to the watermark. (or more precisely, they could steal the watermarked image, but because the mark was hard to remove it wasn't worth it, and you couldn't leave the mark on for obvious reasons.)
Watermarks have been used for a long time on sites hosting high res photos or other digital art to prevent people from just downloading the image and using it. In order to get an image with the WATERMARK removed, you had to pay for the picture. Because the watermarks were translucent and applied over of the picture they are relatively difficult to simply remove.
Only very recently has watermarking technology been applied like a serial number, to uniquely identifying documents or files.
** Quite Simply there is no 'automatic' association with unique identifiers and watermarks. **
Aha, but that is external to the device, visible and alterable (potentially) by the user. The iTunes mark is not.
The itunes meta tag is not part of the song data, although it is in the same file.
It is visible in the sense that *any* program that can view the meta tags can see it -- and iTunes software itself will show you this information if you tell it to show info about the song. And the itunes tag is EASILY removed and or altered which is the antithesis of a watermark.
The iTunes tag is as much a 'watermark', as putting your email address in the filename.
And a watermark is just as identifiable if a record of which marks were sent to who is kept.
This whole 'invisible digital watermark serial number thats hard to remove' thing is pretty new, and really isn't entirely in keeping with the historical meaning or use of watermarks. Moreover, the apple meta tag is really none of those things. Its not invisible, not hard to remove.
If you didn't like the analagy of the laptop serial number because it was visible and alterable. Consider that at least half a dozen parts inside the laptop are also serialized. And that even if you scratch off the laptop serial number, if someone found the laptop they could not only infer what that number was, but potentially also who bought it.
Point is: laptops aren't 'watermarked' despite having serial numbers. And neither are iTunes files.
Re:I wish (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who wouldn't? (Score:2, Informative)
What about, however, sync licensing? Ringtones? OTA downloads? What about exploiting pre-release exclusives? What about getting front-page feature spots? Certainly, the market adjusts when consumers and producers find that happy equilibrium price. When you're dealing with an almost-perfectly inelastic supply curve, this really comes down to consumer preference. There's no reason to preclude iTunes from the overall strategy by going niche-vendor-only. However, considering Cupertino's general reticence toward helping independent distributors to provide content, especially in a DRM-free format, I'd venture that independent artists have even less of a chance of getting this to happen.
From a business standpoint, I'd rather make 60% of something than 100% of nothing. Most digital distributors are dying to find good, new talent, and there are ones specialized in just about every genre you could want. Exclusivity typically comes up for working the distribution, but artists still retain ownership of their masters and publishing rights. Within any genre, there's at least one distro that allows the deal to be terminated by the artist at any given time for dissatisfaction with the service (we're one such). Getting proper distribution (which includes advertisement, feature spots, and maximizing price points within the target demographic) isn't as hard as most artists think.