It's only taken crippling, costly DRM, rampant, widespread piracy, and the best part of 10 plus years, and slowly, [make that very slowly] someone, somewhere, in the music industry is beginning to understand. Or maybe just run out of ideas... With unbelievable spectacular PR disasters, such as Sonys Rootkits fiasco several years ago, the suing of children for downloading nursery rhymes and clunky, over zealous music applications, as well as big budget failures of DRM media players such as Microsoft's Zune, you do have to give them points for trying just about everything.Everything that is, except what the consumer wanted in the first place.
Complexity sells, and the music industry knows that. Witness eternal 'Limited editions' and repackaging, and releasing four versions of a single by an artist. So when the web first introduced us to people who were able to buy music cheaper than we could, the days of fat cat music industry execs getting away with charging £15 for a CD, were never going to last. We knew that. Sadly they weren't ever going to play fair.
Fast forward to February 2006, and Apple fanboys will probably praise Steve Jobs eternally for his open letter as being the one who turned the tide. However, as many have already stated, he only pointed out what everyone already knew. Just that he was the first real corporate media mogul to admit it. [Cough, improve iTunes revenue, cough.]
So is this a win for the consumer? Give it time, but the beginnings are there, and that could mean less clutter, improved software. And the simplicity of just being able to listen to what you want, where you want, on what you want. With software or player that doesn't require a lawyer and tech support person be with you at all times.
Techcrunch.com does a great round-up of the hopefuls out there offering unburdened legal music, check out the link in this posts title, for some [un DRM'd] music to your ears.
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