Yahoo says “DRM doesn’t add any value”
This is the closest I have ever been to buying a Jessica Simpson tune.
The Yahoo music blog writes (link: buy-a-customized-jessica-simpson-mp3-at-yahoo-music):
“You can buy a personalized version of the new Jessica Simpson song “A Public Affair” from Yahoo! Music’s Web Site (Music.Yahoo.com) for $1.99, and it’s an MP3. Dear digital consumer, even if you’re not into Jessica Simpson, and you’re not excited about spending $2 for a song, let me tell you, this is a bigger deal than you might think.
As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.
We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway! And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.”
