The biggest issue at the Midem conference for day one, by a big margin, is NOT P2P clients, or illegal sharing or any of the legal issues, but a rather prosaic issue: interoperability. As panelists in the first session said, next year we’ll be talking about this in the same urgent tones as the illegal file downloading…
Most of the blame is going to the new DRM formats like InterTrust and others…the electronics and technology players are working on their own agenda…a lot of blame is being pushed on Apple’s door as well, for AAC…
In this early adopter phase of download services, it doesn’t matter as people are getting acclimatized to the MP3 players and online services they can use to download music to this hardware. But as the market matures, as people have multiple MP3 players, use multiple online services, it will become of the biggest issues.
Charles Grimsdale, CEO of OD2, the biggest download service in Europe said this: This whole thing can just die, if consumers become confused with this…the DRM system can split it all open.” [some paraphrase]
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