Anti-DRM Madness!

This San Jose Mercury News article was just one of a number of stories consulting the “Major Labels Considering MP3?” oracle in the past couple of weeks. I scored a quote, but didn’t exactly come out saying anything earth-shattering.

Today I had the pleasure of sitting in on a podcast recording between Dave Goldberg and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, to appear on TalkCrunch either Friday (tomorrow) or Monday. Dave summed up how I feel on the topic, and have felt since I first started posting Beastie Boys songs from the road in 1998. In 1999, at the height of Napster Madness, I wrote an open letter and sent it to everyone I knew in the music industry pleading with them to stop attempting to shut down P2P and to instead BUILD GREAT PRODUCTS WORTH PAYING FOR. I wish I still had that letter (anyone?).

It’s been a long hard road since then. I’m stoked to see the mind share we’re converting to our “DRM solves nothing” cult, to be saying these and having people reply with “right-on” rather than “yeah, right”. Still, we’re not anywhere near out of the woods yet. It should be an interesting year. Thanks for playing along.

Stop treating your customers like thieves,
ian

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Trackbacks & Pings

  1. FISTFULAYEN » Blog Archive » Dave Goldberg on going DRM-Free on TalkCrunch on 10 Jan 2007 at 10:32 am

    [...] As promised in last week’s post, here’s the podcast of Dave talking to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch on TalkCrunch. [...]

Comments

  1. Crockett wrote:

    re: “…record labels recognize that it’s tremendously important to protect content from unauthorized distribution…”

    Is this really the way the record labels view reality, or are there some executives looking forward?

    Can the record labels seriously not see that there will be NO MORE CONTROLLING DISTRIBUTION of audio without value added?????

    Trying to control sharing of the “plain audio” (no value added) will be about as winning a battle as, say, trying to charge kids for memorizing and verbally sharing song lyrics. This would be waging a battle against human nature. It would take a society like this to accomplish.

    Posted 05 Jan 2007 at 3:19 am

  2. jonathan wrote:

    “We see the major labels dipping their toes in the water,” said Ian Rogers, director of product management at Yahoo! Music.

    Ahem, that’s VP of product management at Yahoo! to you bitch-ass ;-)

    Posted 07 Jan 2007 at 2:05 pm

  3. scott wrote:

    keep fightin’ the good fight brotha – you’ll win :-) drm blows… did you hear that quote from ballmer that they’re putting their money on zune’s drm? that’s so sad. In the same interview he basically blamed playsforsure failures on MS’s “business partners” (failing to mention, of course, that their MSN Music service tanked worse than any of their partner’s services)

    Posted 19 Jan 2007 at 12:32 pm

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