Boing Boing posts that “Damien Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, has a great editorial in the NYTimes [stupid crappy registration and expiring link, I know] today, describing why DRM systems are bad for artists:”
Tech-savvy fans won’t go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans (those who don’t know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don’t use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won’t load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple’s iPods, for example) and sometimes won’t even play in their computers.
Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that’s at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.
As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren’t such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn’t sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.
Kulash expands on his rant in his guest blogging entry at Coolfer, making many good additional points about the technology and the economics of DRM.
Up until recently, the music industry saw little need to listen to critics of draconian DRM. However, ars technica reports that “A recent story in the E-Commerce Times suggests that the labels are now losing customers to their aggressive DRM tactics.” Although most of the information in that article is anecdotal rather than quantitative, it is evident that consumers and artists alike are getting fed up with the music industry’s oblivious refusal to move into the 21st century, battling with technology rather than embracing it.
