thought this article from the computer buyer website might be of interest
http://www.computerbuyer.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=90613Yahoo! gets personal with DRM-free download 11:01AM
Yahoo! is hoping that personalised versions of the new Jessica Simpson single will herald the introduction of DRM-free music downloads.
The US-only service is offering Simpson's single as an MP3 file stripped of any copy protection, into which the buyer can choose to have their name inserted, provided that it is on the expanding list.
For the privilege of personalisation, Yahoo! is charging $1,99, twice what you might expect to pay for a DRM-restricted, bog-standard download, but according to Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers that is not the point.
'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,' he wrote in the Y! Music blog.
'Not only is it pretty cool to have a version of the song which speaks to me (I was shocked to see they had "Ian",
did they do that for me?), but it's in MP3 format, which I have no problem paying a little more for.'
He added that $1.99 is a premium price because of the personalisation, not the absence of DRM and that the right price for MP3s is somewhere between $0.99 and there.
Yahoo! is alone among the leading digital music services in calling for the freedom to sell DRM-free music. Earlier this year, Dave Goldberg, the head of Yahoo! Music, told the Music 2.0 conference, that copy protection is holding back the growth of the digital market. His thoughts were echoed by Rogers.
'As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now,' Rogers wrote. '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.'
DRM is also expensive to implement, he said, and Yahoo! would rather have its engineers building better software, Rogers said.
But much as DRM-free downloads would certainly prove popular - at least among the tech savvy if the contributors to this site's Comments forum are any indication - they do not address the issue of quality, with many potential digital music buyers less concerned about DRM than they are about the - perceived or real - lo-fi, 128-bit encoding that the overwhelming majority of downloads services offer.
