Universal Music Group has announced that it will test the market by selling DRM-Free Music. High-quality downloads will be offered through digital retailers such as Rhapsody, Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Real Networks, Transworld, and PureTracks; but not iTunes. This is in hope of taking away the iTunes monopoly, by building more retail outlets for consumers. Universal refused to enter into any long-term licensing deals with iTunes, and opted for a month-to-month arrangement.
This is really good news, both as a step towards DRM-free music, and towards the ending of a digital music monopoly (iTunes).
Personally, I’ll continue to not buy music digitally, instead getting physical copies (I do love me some album liners, and if I’m lucky enough- some vinyl). But, it’s good news nonetheless, not like DRM actually ever did anything but annoy people.
All music should be DRM free but why not release it on iTunes? Do they feel that people will just send it to all of their friends because of the large user base? All of the other digital retailers put together don’t even add up to the market of iTunes. Maybe Universal is doing this as a test before they put it out to the masses.
By one company and one program having a monopoly on an entire business, it hurts innovation. When Internet Explorer was 99% of the web browser biz, nothing really happened with it for years. After Firefox, Opera and others began to gain ground, IE7 was released to address issues like severe lack of CSS support, security and tabbed browsing.
iTunes is quickly turning the way of IE. While its slickly integrated on a mac, the PC version is clunky, and a resource-hog. Other apps such as foobar2000 and MediaMonkey do their jobs much better at a lot less cost on RAM. iTunes is also widely regarded as having one of the poorest encoders, as anyone who uses EAC with Lame can tell you. If I’ve been informed correctly, the music sold on most sites/app stores is $.99 a song (which in my opinion is too much). Competition would also have a good chance of lowering this price to something a bit more reasonable.
The idea of people going elsewhere for music will help to spark a rush of development on the side of Apple, which will benefit everyone. After all, competition is a key part of capitalism!
I agree with you on most of that. Its great to have choices and competition is needed to innovate and move forward with ideas. But with the IE thing there wasn’t really a choice back in the day and thats what started its dominance. And at that point IE sucked and people wanted a better browser so thats why Firefox and others came along. Even though iTunes was one of the first online music stores it was instantly the easiest and best place to get digital music from and still is today. Monopoly? Yes some might think so but there are plenty of other choices unlike back in the day when IE was there on its own. I rarely use the iTunes Store because I get the physical copies of albums, but when I’m looking for digital music and it’s DRM free I’ll go to iTunes first because I love it’s ease of use. So as far as iTunes going the way of IE thats not quite the deal, iTunes will always be changing and moving forward even if they are the top player. It won’t be sitting there just because it has the largest market.