I had a chance to speak at the MusicTank DRM event on Wednesday night. The keynote was by Richard Gooch, a Deputy Director at the IFPI, the international music body which looks out for the record companies. The discussion was focused on protecting intellectual property versus the consumer's right to play their music on various devices.
It turned out to be a lot more balanced panel than I was expecting and both sides were represented but at the end very little progress had been made. The IFPI guy still loved DRM, the consumer folks still said it stood on consumer's toes.
There was a lot of discussion about consumers voting with their feet if they disliked the DRM mechanisms a download service applied. But it's just not like that. Our music industry research shows that consumers are twice as likely to download illegally when they hit a problem with DRM.
There's also a perception from the pro-DRM side that those who download illegally don't want to pay for music. That's simply not true. You'll always find that for some people any price is too expensive but most music fans want an easy to use service with tracks they want and without the risks of viruses and legal action they can face on the illegal networks.
And that's what they can't always find at the minute. Why can't I use my Creative Zen with iTunes? Why can't I use my iPod with Napster? Why can't I burn that track to a CD for my car? These are problems that people face every day with the legitimate download services and you're still paying a similar price that you'd pay for a CD. And you're paying a lot more compared to an unrestricted version from a filesharing network. A few small improvements to the download services will attract more users back from the filesharing networks than any amount of legal action ever will.
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