There is a new trend in the music industry: Sell DRM-free tracks, songs untethered to copyrights. The trend is being set by Apple. Songs purchased on Itunes may be read by any competitor's mp3 player. On iTunes, DRM-free tracks are about 30 cents pricier than copy-protected songs.
Amazon.com follows the same trend as they announced they will open a digital store featuring songs without anti-piracy technology. EMI CEO Eric Nicoli is leading the record label march. Are those the same guys that threatened to destroy people's life with heavy fines because of illegal file-sharing?
The vision shared by these bipolar leaders is: flexibility and CD-audio quality.
Apple is probably not going to make a U-turn on this decision, since turning all of its tracks in non-DRM formats will take them a little more than six months. Moreover, marketing researches have shown that purchasing songs on the Internet holds two barriers: quality and compatibility.
The trick is to have all industry leaders drop their weapons at the same time. Steve Jobs called on the world's four major record companies to start selling songs online without copy-protection software. However, Apple also will continue to encode its songs in the AAC audio format, which could force some users to go through an extra step of converting tunes into a version that would be compatible with their players.
So all-the-while Jobs is encouraging everybody to follow him hands down, he is not giving up on controlling the music playing industry. No wonder. Here is a good reason for not giving it up: The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is a file-sharing collective, one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading, is only the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright (pro-piracy) movement that is striking terror in the heart of an industry that seems ever less capable of stopping it.
The Pirate Bay alone claims more than 5 million active users. According to Internet traffic ranker Alexa.com, it's the 292nd most popular site in the world (Netflix is 382; the U.S. Postal Service is 385; Wal-Mart is 391). Such popularity could make many companies pretty jealous, mostly companies of the same industry.
Peter Sunde, the Pirate Bay's head software designer, has spoken about the Pirate Bay's upcoming project to design its own next generation file-sharing technology, one of its goals being to make every transaction completely untraceable. The project will be open source, meaning programmers from all over the world will be able to contribute.
Pirates are trend-setters nowadays, the new Pradas of geeknology. The threat is big enough to make Steve Jobs back up on his "I-rule-the-music-industry" megalomania craziness. On the other hand, Amazon is not completely diving in the new direction. Opening a website rather than changing the content of the original one looks like a desire to stay flexible, in case of...
Therefore, everyone is dropping the gun, but they all have a dagger in their boot.
By the way, blogger Jester makes a good new point about new DRM-free tracks and Itunes 7.2, read here.
