Digital Diversion

I ran across the article below by Chris Pirillo on CNN.com and thought that it was so good that I would post it in its entirety.  Chris does a great job of demonstrating a point that I made in one of my previous posts about being careful not to lock yourself into a technology that may limit your flexibility somewhere down the road.  You can draw your own conclusions from the article, but let me offer up a few additional insights:

• For those that are not fans of subscription services and would prefer to purchase your music, there are DRM-free music downloads available.  My favorite is Amazon’s download service which, in addition to being DRM-free, offers songs at a lower price than iTunes ($.89/song) and provides songs at a higher bit rate (better audio quality). 
• While Chris likes subscription music services, he fails to point out that those services do include a DRM; those songs are yours to use only as long as you pay your monthly bill.
• To my second point, I do believe that there is a role for DRM in establishing new business models for music.  In addition to the subscription model, DRM enables free ad-supported offerings such as Spiralfrog. For that reason alone, DRM will not go away in it’s entirety.  
• With or without DRM, consumer choice is always a good thing. 

Enjoy the article … 

Back in my day (a day not long ago, as it turns out), you could go down to the local record shop and plunk down your paper-route money for little disks of plastic that were embedded with the latest sounds of your favorite musical performers.

Whether your tastes ran from Al Jarreau to “Weird Al” Yankovic, you could be assured that those purchased disks were yours — for keeps.

You could play ‘em over and over until they were scratched beyond repair, you could lend ‘em to friends, you could amplify ‘em at illicit Charleston dancing parties, you could sell ‘em to used record stores or you could store ‘em away in a safe deposit box in hopes they’d gain value as collector’s items.

You could even make precious mix tapes for your soda-sharing sweetheart with songs copied from ‘em, though this made recording industry executives more than a little nervous. And it wasn’t long before their weaselly whimpers of protest began. (continue reading…)