If this were true, it would be the best news for music lovers in years.

Allegedly, some of the executives of unnamed big record companies said that they could start selling DRM-free music - in other words, plain old free MP3s. The news comes from Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, however, nothing of it seems to be confirmed in any remotely official way.

Although it sounds nice, it’s highly unlikely that it will happen anytime soon or even at all. RIAA has been suing people left and right for downloading or uploading MP3s, and there’s no way they’ll change their stance on this overnight. It would make them look stupid (OK, stupidER) if they were suing people for something that one of their members is offering for free.

The fact that Yahoo and some other companies have been offering some music tracks for free definitely don’t mean they’re ready to start offering all music for free. All companies have only one thing in mind - profit - and they will never make any moves which ultimately don’t lead to increase in profits. DRM is for them currently a cool new way to get more money, and I don’t see why they should drop it unless they were forced to do it.

Again, I would like to point out that DRM means Digital Rights Management, not Digital Rights Mastery. This means that it can also used positively - to increase the value of content instead of diminishing it. In this case, DRM wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. Check my article on positive and negative DRM here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 7:08 am and is filed under Web, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.