Trends that Should R.I.P. in 2008: #2 - DRM
DRM
DRM (digital rights management) does not work. As anyone with any technical knowledge will tell you, it’s far too easy to defeat. In case there are some people who don’t realize how you can get rid of DRM, here’s how you do it: burn the music files with DRM to a CD, rip them from the CD back to your PC, and sync them to any device.
DRM is not the way for record labels to grow the digital music medium. If anything, it’s a way to kill another method for selling music to the masses. While some labels are starting the realize that, some are stubbornly sticking to DRM because they assume everyone is a pirate. Well, many of us are not, yet everyone has to pay a high price just to use music any way we want.
I recently experienced the pain of converting all of my PlaysForSure DRM encoded files to CD and ripping them back to my PC so that I could finally sync them to my Zune. I purchased the last of my digital tunes via MusicMatch Jukebox (now known as Yahoo Music Jukebox) a year ago after realizing the Zune didn’t support PlaysForSure, which is a Microsoft-built DRM system by the way, and had to go through this process to make my songs playable again:
- Download and install the new version of Yahoo Music Jukebox after discovering that MusicMatch Jukebox no longer existed.
- Reacquire the license for every single tune with PlaysForSure DRM on it because, of course, Yahoo Music Jukebox was smart enough to automatically figure out that I purchased these songs in MusicMatch Jukebox before they “Yahooed it.”
- Click on every single tune to download the license, a process that was extremely tedious and time consuming with the amount of songs I had with PlaysForSure DRM on it; there is no mass method for reacquiring the license for all songs you legally purchased.
- Burn all of my songs to CD through Yahoo Music Jukebox, which took some time to complete with the number of songs I had to burn.
- Rip all of my songs back to my PC.
During the process, I remembered why people turn to “the dark side” and use file sharing sites. I spent most of my time grumbling and cursing DRM and thinking that this is one of the many reasons why the record industry is in trouble. I don’t condone pirating music, but I understand why people do it after my recent experiences with DRM.
Record labels – let my music go.