Amazon Goes DRM-free - And So Do We (Almost)

This is big news:

Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software.

It's important not so much because of the songs that will be freed in this way, as for the huge publicity it gives to the idea of being DRM-free. Until now, few end-users have really understood what the implications of DRM were; but once big names like Amazon start pushing the virtues of DRM-free stuff, then people will naturally demand it from other outlets - and from other labels alongside the enlightened EMI.

We're nearly there, people. (Via PaidContent.)

Some Things Do Scale, It Seems

Great quote here:

The most concerning issue is the growth of bandwidth as piracy has shifted from stealing an individual song on Napster to stealing albums on Kaaza to now using Bittorent to steal entire Discographies.

Maybe there's a bit of a lesson to be learned from this. If music companies had sorted this out a few years back, and gone straight to DRM-less downloads, they wouldn't be facing this massively greater problem today. Moreover, once entire discographies are being passed around, the game's over, because the record companies have nothing left to offer as an incentive to choose them over underground sources.

Music to My Ears

There's a fascinating story over on BBC News, nominally about Madonna, but really about a new commons. It reports on how concerts are becoming ever-more important to rock stars, as sales of their recordings diminish.

The latter fact may be due to the Internet; but whether it is or not, the future seems to be one where the digital stuff - the song - is essentially free, and the stars make their dosh from the analogue side - concerts. So here we have pop songs as a new commons, where the creators of that commons make a more than decent living.

Two quotations in particular are worth noting. One is from Alan Krueger, an economist, who provides the figures to back up this idea:

Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than live concerts. For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to one in 2002.

The other is from the ever-perceptive David Bowie:

music itself is going to become like running water or electricity

Now that's music to my ears.