Count me in the crowd buying much more music on Itunes when DRM free. And you can for sure also count me in the crowd which stops to buy DRMed music on iTunes completely.

All of this super anti-DRM talk has really just been fodder for the techies and bloggers (whoa are one in the same).

It’s bad for the music business. It’s bad for the artists.

Why don’t you journalist folks tell Steve Jobs to play fair with Fairplay? That would solve 90% of the issues. But no, most of you guys would rather suckle the teet of Jobs instead of taking him to task for destroying DRM’s acceptance.

The European courts knew what they were doing by putting his a$$ to the fire. Why are you being so nice?

Oh, I know, because you all use Macs. Friggin sheep, all of you.

But might the rest of us pay a little extra for DRM free music? (30 cents extra on iTunes, I believe). I don’t like being locked down and do my best to strip off DRM from purchased music. I may be willing to purchase DRM free music for slightly more rather than resorting to the gaunlet of P2P networks…

From my personal experience, it’s the non-techies who buy the DRM-laden music–they don’t even know what DRM really is.

As a techie, I can say I don’t buy DRM songs. I’d rather buy my music on CD and encode them at the bitrate I want in the format I want–Not what the record label decides is best for me.

The freedom from DRM in music will never trump the fact that there’s a lot of people who will get their music through the wonders of torrents.

You might see a slight bump in sales, but I don’t see people getting rich(er) off of this.

By and large users don’t like rental models, and will avoid / get around / etc. Take it away and you will entice people back.

As for MP3 being a lousy format compared to iTunes…we’re hardly talking hi fidelity playout devices here in the main!

I talk about Rhapsody a bit more indepth here:
(link)

At the moment though, I am playing with a loaner Squeezebox and it’s almost as potent as the Sonos because it also supports Rhapsody/Pandora. These music services are the “killer apps” of new music devices.

The average person who buys music will still get it from ITunes in whatever format their favorite song comes in. If AAC is cheaper then that’s what they will go with. If they want a higher quality then they will pay for it even if it comes wrapped in Fairplay. MP3 as a format sucks and people will care more about that than if they can play their songs on 8 players and 4 extra computers they don’t have.

All of the talk that DRM free music “will create thousands of stores to sell the music so digital music” Sure, labels taking DRM requirements off of music will give a lot of stores the opportunity to sell music but it doesn’t mean people are going to leave ITunes to go buy from all these new stores. They wont. At least not in any numbers that matters.

Include the fact that the labels are still charging highway robbery licensing/advance fees (Million$) to enable a store to sell their music and you have an automatically crippled digital retail marketplace. Big stores like Amazon will come into the marketplace and add nothing new that would make people leave ITunes. The innovative stores will never get a chance to flourish thanks to those fees. If you think about it the slim margins of selling music a’la carte makes it unappealing to anyone that can’t sell it as a loss leader. Outside of Apple only subscription services can thrive under these conditions if you are a pure music play.

The only stores we will see significant sales from over the next few years will be Sprint’s, Verizon’s, T-Mobile’s and AT&T’s on deck mobile music stores… oh and of course ITunes. I bet all of them will use DRM for the mobile sales. If they don’t people will be bluetoothing & MMS’ing tracks to each other like crazy. It will make Bittorrent look like child’s play.

Thanks for being so shortsighted EMI. Did the fee Amazon and the other fools pay you pad your bottom line enough to make it worth killing your industry?