Wal-Mart Music sent out an email on Sept. 26th to all its digital download service members. It informed them that beginning October 9th, they would no longer be offering DRM support. The Wal-Mart Music Store (seen at the right) began selling DRM-free only downloads starting in February of 2008. This means that any song that was purchased before February 2008 would no have the DRM system to support it, and so would no longer work at all. Their advice was to back up those songs on a CD, to be ripped back off onto your hard-drive and in doing so, losing the DRM limitations.
It is impressive that Wal-Mart would offer nothing but DRM-free downloads at the same price as they offered before. That said, it seems unfair, irresponsible, unethical and even greedy that those songs which were legally purchased would simply cease to work, since many people will be forced to re-buy the same songs they will lose. The only option they offer is to burn CD's in their Wal-Mart default .wma format and rip them back in .mp3 format which means serious loss of quality in the reformatting. This, along with the sheer number of music files people have, makes Wal-Mart's proposed solution a fairly poor one.
If the top music retailer in the country is moving towards a DRM-free format, certainly the whole industry will move that way. This will prove beneficial to consumers and fans, as long as older downloaded songs do not become obsolete. In my research of Wal-Mart's issue, I offered my thoughts in the commentary of two different heavily discussed blogs. The first was on www.readwriteweb.com, the post was titled Wal-Mart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not the Answer. The second was on www.boingboing.net titled Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection. The first criticizes the notion of DRM, specifically citing Wal-Mart's move as an example of " the music industry... struggling to gain a foot-hold in the battle with online piracy." The latter argues that by making the older songs obsolete, Wal-Mart is basically punishing those who acted legally, because those with illegal downloads have no such issues with DRM. As well as posting my comments on these blogs, I have posted them below.
Wal-Mart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not the Answer
Post:
I certainly appreciate your laments on the downfalls of DRM protected songs. They cause frustration and inconvience invariably. However, I do think that it is important as well to consider and remember why DRM was put into place to begin with. Not only from a business point of view, but from a historical point of view as well. Granted, it was not too long ago, but the music industry has been forced to change quite a bit over the past 10 years. At the time when iTunes was just unleashing the iTunes Store, Napster had just been shutdown, peer to peer was king of digital downloads, and the record labels were terrified of the idea of any sort of downloading of music. They tried to protect their intellectual property in any way possible, even creating CDs that couldn't be recognized by a computer at all, and part of this protection was the use of DRM in audio files. While it is certainly a hassle to deal with, it was necessary to have for the record labels to get the piece of mind they needed to allow iTunes and all subsequent legal download businesses to get started. Now, the distributors of digital downloads are slowly moving towards rescinding DRM restrictions, and I think you are entirely correct in saying that Wal-Mart has done a poor job of making that move. Whether through oversight or lack of caring, they have not considered the consumer at all. ITunes also is already offering some of their songs in a DRM-free format, and for previously downloaded songs, they offer a 30-cent upgrade. Even without the upgrade, the songs will not become obsolete. Wal-Mart should certainly offer a similiar protection program for those who will otherwise be left with inoperative audio files.
Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection.
Post:
Thank you for bringing up the relatively recent moral dilemma that DRM and digital downloads present. The way that Wal-Mart has dealt with moving away from DRM songs is just one more reason to shy away from legal digital downloads. You now can't even be sure that if you do purchase something legally, it will continue to play for years to come. While you don't have to have the hassle of DRM downloading through peer to peer networks, you do have to worry about being sued by the RIAA, and the potential heavy conscience from stealing intellectual property. According to slyck.com, you have a higher chance of being killed in day-to-day living than you do of being sued by the RIAA (http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=769), but that doesn't mean it can't happen to you. Jammie Thomas is a single mother from Minnesota who was the first person to let an RIAA suit go to trial. She lost the case and had to pay $222,000. Copyright infringement is not cheap to mess with if you do get caught. This hasn't stopped the youth of today, and the disregard for musical intellectual property is changing the way that the industry works. A survey of British kids ages 14-24 revealed that "Around 90% of respondents now own an MP3 player. They contain an average of 1770 tracks - half of which have not been paid for." (http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/2008/06/18/survey-of-british-youth/) This is astounding. Along with new technology comes the slow adoption of it, and eventually the exploration and regulation of it's limitations. This is what happened with file sharing, and now with DRM. They are being pushed into the technological age.
1 comment:
Thank you for that excellent post. You chose a great topic and were thorough in your research. Your interactive/blogger style of writing has already evolved since your first post. In an online medium, style and tone sometimes are more important than content when it comes to spawning a discussion. Your use of hyperlinks where necessary is superb and is a great aid in gaining a wholistic view of the topic at hand. The paragraphs are short and easy to digest and still provide ample background information to the subtopics. I am envious of your seamless transition from your contextualizing first section into your comments of other bloggers. This is a stylistic element I struggle with when forming my own posts. The documents referenced come from reputable bloggers who appear knowledgeable and professional; you did a commendable job at taking away what information you needed and crafting your own unique commentary.
I have very few criticisms about this post as a result of its sound structure and content. One comment I have is that there doesn’t seem to be enough information regarding the benefits of Wal-Mart’s decision. The loss of DRM restrictions will probably change the industry and I am interested to know what effects this might have on digital music retailers and the entire music industry. How do the major labels and artists feel about Wal-Mart’s move? Also for the casual blog reader that may not know what percent of the online music retail industry Wal-Mart commands, it might be prudent to offer a pie chart or something of the industry’s sales. In the end this was a very effective post regarding an extremely noteworthy topic.
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