2006 - 1,171 views, 3 Comments

Summary: Yahoo has started offering DRM-free (free of Digital Rights Management software) music. "Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label, or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies..." says Yahoo.

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Yahoo has become perhaps the first major provider of digital media downloads to offer popular music downloads with no digital rights management (DRM) build in.

This means that once you buy and download the MP3, you can put it anywhere you want, on any computer or MP3 player you want, without being impeded by a proprietary copy protection scheme.

Readers of the Internet Patrol may remember the problems which Sony had with their digital rights management software, which lead to security holes on customers’ computers, and a lawsuit against Sony for the damage done by their DRM software.

Yahoo is the first big player to do away with all that.

“Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label, or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform,” explained Ian Rogers, Director of Yahoo Product Management.

“As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now,” added Rogers.

This should make things very interesting.

The first offering includes Jessica Simpson’s “A Public Affair”, which you can download - DRM free - from the Yahoo Music Store.

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3 Comments »

Good on Yahoo! it’s been well known for quite some time that the only ones to see more than a pittance from recorded music sales, tape, cd or whatever are the RIAA and the corporations. The artists come dead last on the recording industry food chain. This decision by Yahoo! will not help me much, my musical tastes run to music that is produced by small non RIAA outfits, but I still applaud Yahoo! for having the corporate guts to make this decision.
JWW

Comment by J. Wellington Wells — 7/21/2006 @ 3:22 pm
Add to my above remarks: Most of the small music companies I do business with offer free samples of full songs from their lists, it does not seem to hurt their business, but rather encourages me to buy their physical products, the
cd-s, to hear other music by the artists they offer. Win, win, win for me, the recording company and the artists.
JWW

Comment by J. Wellington Wells — 7/21/2006 @ 3:30 pm
A step in the right direction,congratulations.
Greedy corporations look out! The writing is on the wall.

Comment by jim hyslop — 9/9/2006 @ 8:59 am

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