Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Why is DRM so contentious? Surely it's designed to protect the rights of artists and record companies in a climate where, as one international music industry body claims, illegal downloads swamp legitimate music store downloads by a ratio of 20 to 1? The problem is DRM doesn't affect the pirates, who upload and download DRM-free files often ripped directly from CD. Instead, it affects legitimate buyers in a range of deeply irritating ways. The first roadblock comes down to Gates' talk of "simplicity" and "interoperability", or rather the lack of both"

I think most people who know anything about DRM hate it. They hate dealing with the limitations of the technology, both intentionally built-in or as a direct result of poor technical planning/implementation. Unlike a good protection scheme which is invisible to the end user, DRM is too limiting to the average customer, and does nothing to stop hardcore music pirates. Plus, when a store goes down and its licenses stop renewing, the customer is the real loser. Sure you can burn your songs to a CD and re-rip them (or do it virtually), but the process is time-consuming and you lose audio fidelity. Another option is to free your purchased music using tools like FairUse4WM (above) or Hymn, or just buy DRM-free in the first place. Check out the article if you need yet another reason to hate DRM.

"As of today, you no longer have to use the Rhapsody application to purchase music from the company, and all of the single song downloads in its store are available as unprotected MP3s. Rhapsody's offering differs from that of Amazon MP3 because prospective buyers can preview full tracks -- up to 25 of them per month -- before deciding whether or not to purchase them on Rhapsody or one of its partner sites. The new service will roll out to Rhapsody's new partners as well, iLike, MTV Networks and Yahoo."



With this move Rhapsody has a lot to offer. Subscription services, check. Non-DRM'd MP3's, check. Useful partners, check. I'll be interested to see how iLike works out as I think a music store integrated into Facebook could do pretty well.

"Today Yahoo made two announcements, they are going to stop their current music service and partner with Rhapsody to provide a new service, and they have also purchased FoxyTunes, a developer of a tool-bar plug-in that enables users to control more than 30 desktop and Web-based music players. This makes an acquisition by Microsoft all the more interesting since Rhapsody and the Zune Marketplace would become a sibling rivalry. With relevance to FoxyTunes none of the details have been released, but we will let you know more when the information becomes available."

Even as Microsoft tries to buy up Yahoo, it is still business as usual at Yahoo. I am assuming that they are hoping that a partnership with Rhapsody will position them better to compete with the other music services. At least as a subscription based service, no one really gets shafted by Yahoo shuttering their current service.