Larry Gardner’s Blog

Digital Rights Management (often referred to as Digital Restrictions Management) has been a hot topic of discussion on the internets, especially as it applies to music and video. The record companies have made it clear that they don’t want you to copy music, which in this age of computers and iPods means they don’t want you to use it the way you want to use it. Sure, they’ve sorta-kinda said it’s ok to rip your CDs to your computer so you can put the songs into iTunes and on your iPod, but they don’t want you to EVER use file-sharing networks or make mix CDs for your friends. At the iTunes Store, the biggest online music seller, most songs have been “protected” by DRM, so you can’t copy them to another computer unless it’s “authorized” and you can’t share them with your friends. The DRM also locked you into an iPod–none of the other music players would play Apple’s proprietary format. Yet, from the beginning, you’ve always been able to rip a CD from an iTunes playlist and then create “unprotected” MP3 files from the CD, totally circumventing the DRM.

Where music is concerned, it appears the record companies have finally gotten the message, with all four major music companies allowing DRM-free MP3 files to be sold by Amazon, and some on the iTunes Music Store. It’s inevitable that almost all songs will be available DRM-free soon. And it’s about damn time!

Surprisingly, I’ve rarely heard anyone mention that there have always been easy ways to to get your favorite tunes without paying for them. When I first heard the record companies whining about losing revenues through file sharing, my first reaction was: If you want to keep people from getting your music free, take it off the friggin’ radio!

When I was thirteen years old, I was taping songs off the radio and splicing them together to make mix tapes to share with my friends, and I always had the latest, most popular songs. That was over fifty years ago. True, it wasn’t digital. Still isn’t. It has the stigma of analog, which of course makes it vastly inferior (tongue planted firmly in cheek) even though it has to be analog when it’s recorded and it has to be analog before you can hear it.

Actually, having been a broadcast engineer for many years and with some major stations, I can tell you that under good receiving conditions, an FM radio station is quite capable of delivering near-perfect fidelity–better than most consumer-grade CD players, and better than satellite radio. All that music has been available for a long time to anyone capable of running a simple cable from a decent FM tuner to the audio input of their computer.

This situation has put the record industry on the horns of a dilemma. Radio is still their best way to promote their music, and they do everything they can to get their songs played. (Have you heard of payola?) Remember, too, that radio stations pay to play that music, through contracts with licensing agencies like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. Satellite has to pay, too, and the RIAA wants them to pay even more. Netcasters, too, have to pay–even more dearly than broadcasters.

So, the plus side is the record companies get paid by the broadcasters and they get incredible promotion value from the air play. The downside is that all that music is out there, free for the ripping. What the record companies have going for them is most people won’t go to the trouble to rip songs off the air, especially now that they have colluded with consumer electronics manufacturers to keep appliances that make the process easy off the market. (Remember when you could buy a boom box that could rip from radio or CD or cassette to a built-in cassette recorder? Why can’t you buy one that copies to CD?)

From the point of view of a consumer electronics manufacturer, it would be trivial to design and market a satellite radio receiver with a built-in hard drive that could record any or all songs from a “channel” and make them available for playback and transfer to your computer. Since satellite radio transmits “metadata” along with the music, all the information for identifying and cataloging songs is there, ripe for the picking. But does anyone actually sell such a box? Hell no. The RIAA has leveraged their influence to make it damn inconvenient and expensive to get the music for “free”. If such boxes were available, the money would go to the electronics manufacturers instead of the music industry. (And keep in mind, you’re paying for the satellite radio service!)

One way or the other, if you want music some money is going to come out of your pocket. Say you bought a magic box that captures the music for $300. For that, you could go to Amazon or iTMS and buy about 300 songs. If you’re a casual listener, that might be enough music to keep you going for a long time. Maybe for the useful life of the device. If you listen to music mostly on your computer or CDs that you rip from it, either choice might be fine. And people like convenience. Personally, I’d rather pay for a song that can be painlessly purchased and downloaded online than to go to Wal-Mart and buy the CD or go to the trouble to find it on one of the file-sharing sites.

So What’s Happened?

The RIAA has gone through contortions, wailing, lobbying, gnashing of teeth and litigation to maintain their business model of distributing music through a tangible, warehouseable, shippable, inventoryable, traceable thing: the CD. By having this model, they retained their stranglehold on (mostly underpaid and abused) artists and retail merchandisers. They seemed to be willing to do anything to control the music and to cram this outdated system down the customer’s throat, even to the point of suing them for trying to get around it. It resulted in new, harebrained laws being passed, frustrating customers by not allowing them to put music on the player or device of their choice, and what amounts to price-fixing to boot.

The question is: Have they really seen the light? It appears that maybe they have. Finally. They have recognized that their customers are not a bunch of thieves, willing to steal instead of pay a reasonable price for something of value. And music is something of value. But in the digital age, it is not a tangible product anymore. Consumers, in the majority, are willing to pay for value; they are willing to support the artists they love. Also, consumers rarely have an interest in really pirating music–that is, making copies and monetarily profiting from those copies. In the minority, there will always be those who will get the value for free, one way or another. And now, there will be some who simply have come to resent the record companies and their tactics to the point they refuse to contribute one red cent to their coffers. So be it. It’s life. The record companies have made their bed, and now, however much they hate it, must lie in in it. If they are smart, they can survive and prosper in the digital age.

The next question is whether the motion picture and television industries can learn a thing or two from the decade-long music fiasco. Time will tell.