Mon 7 Jan 2008
So the big news is that Sony BMG has announced that it will begin some arrangement for selling its music without DRM; details to follow. See the Business Week article for details. This means all four major record companies have begun to let go of DRM. EMI was the first, selling some of its catalog DRM-free through Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Universal partnered with Amazon in the fall and is rolling out its own TotalMusic service (the idea there is that a low subscription cost would be bundled into the cost of mp3 players — read: not the iPod). Warner offered some of is catalog to Amazon in December, and its alt-label Nonesuch has begun providing DRM-free mp3s with the purchase of CDs.
It is important to note that none of these labels are making their entire catalogs available without DRM just yet, so this is still toe-in-the-water time. Subscription services like Ruckus are still using DRM, as is Apple. Many of the online video providers remain committed to DRM. However, for the major record labels, who have for years been so vociferously committed to DRM, to change their policy like this suggests that the DRM issue has substantively shifted.
It would be nice to think that this move was precipitated by consumer activism, the ideological challenge of alternative models, or (dare I say) scholarly critiques. Sadly, I don’t think this is so. It’s possible that some of the activism against DRM helped focus attention on the problem of consumer frustration, though this is not the same as making the case that DRM is politically or culturally problematic. Rather (and this seems to often be the real story) it is business interests that are accidentally solving the problems caused by business interests. DRM first seemed to the labels like a viable barrier to online file-trading — and, as I have argued, it may have promised to act as a powerful new tollgate for attaching a price tag to more dimensions of music use. But this depended on hardware regulating the use of content. In a way, DRM worked too well: by inserting the hardware into this position of importance, it handed a great deal of power to hardware makers. When one emerged — Apple — who was willing to enter the music-selling business, had a hot technology people wanted, and a powerful cultural ethos, suddenly they were at the center point of this mechanism of sale and control. DRM locked the content to the hardware, helping to drive sales of the iPod and cement Apple’s place in the digital music market. Apple could negotiate with the labels in a way that individual consumers could not. Now the labels, especially Universal, are miffed that Apple won’t budge on how they price their songs, and are finding it more advantageous to join with Amazon or experiment with new models themselves.
I spend much of my teaching and writing suggesting that cultural discourse is important, that the way we characterize issues of public importance can change how we deal with them, that civic participation is vital to bringing about progressive change. But I can’t help but acknowledge that all of that may pale in comparison to how the shifting efforts of corporations in the pursuit of profit brings about change — change that can occasionally have socially beneficial results, as in this case, but almost always accidentally, as an incidental benefit of the play of the market.
(Many apologies for the recent hiatus; life got ahead of me. And happy new year.)
Sony introduced