Monday’s announcement that iTunes will start selling music from gargantuan conglomerate EMI without restrictive digital-rights-management (DRM) technology means that, starting next month, you can download songs from artists on EMI or one of its subsidiaries — the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Elvises Presley and Costello, Lily Allen, Gorillaz — and do with them what you please. Burn them as many times as you want, share ’em, and stash ’em on your phone or almost any mp3 player.
You just have to be willing to pay $1.29 instead of the current 99 cents. As a carrot, iTunes will offer the non-DRM tracks with better sound quality — 256kbps, as opposed to 128kbps — but the original versions, at lower fidelity and trussed up with DRM, will still be sold for the original price.
Some are skeptical. Blogger Jason Kottke, for instance, wonders just how many casual iTunes users would pay more for non-DRM mp3s. “My feeling is that typical consumers won’t care that much . . . lower price will win out over slightly higher quality and some nebulous future flexibility,” he writes at kottke.org. “I bet EMI is even half-hoping for failure on this thing: ‘see, customers *want* DRM.’ ”
Others see the deal differently. “I actually think it’s gonna do pretty well,” says Nicholas Reville, co-founder of Worcester music-industry activist group Downhill Battle. “I think enough people will care about this, especially Mac people, [who] tend to be really concerned with quality. Even if they’re not concerned about the DRM, they’ll be concerned about getting it for the higher quality.”
Leave aside for the moment that subscription sites like eMusic.com have been offering enormous catalogs of indie music, DRM-free, for years now. iTunes, obviously, is a big fish, and EMI is a Goliath. So is this first crack in the armor, the beginning of the end for major-label DRM? “I think the results are going to be pretty positive, and it’s gonna be a strong incentive for the other labels to follow suit,” says Reville. “Now that there’s a two-tier system, the other labels’ products are going to seem really inferior if they aren’t doing something similar.”
Rest assured that the sinking record industry — the Wall Street Journal reported in March that CD sales are already down 20 percent from 2006 — will be watching EMI’s online sales closely. But even if the rest of the Big Four (Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner) were to strike similar deals with iTunes and rid their songs of DRM — thereby showing a rare awareness of what the consumer wants — that still wouldn’t fix the labels’ fundamental ills. Says Reville: “it doesn’t change their bloated business model.”
iTunes may have a sleek and sexy interface, and may now be liberalizing its attitudes toward copy protection, “but it doesn’t solve any of the problems with the current system,” Reville says. “If you’re buying a song for $1.29 from EMI, the artist’s royalty on that is probably 12 cents, maybe 13 cents at most. And a lot of bands on EMI, probably the majority of bands, are in debt [to the label] because of the way the contracts are structured. [The artists] will never see a dime of that royalty. None of this changes that.”
