drawbridge.jpgEven as we get the rumor (not yet substantiated) that the NYT’s dropping their TimeSelect deal (because we can get get Krugman for free anyway and nobody wants to pay to read Tom Friedman), another bit of interesting news is on the horizon:

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, has announced that it will sell tracks from thousands of albums without the customary copy protection software for at least the next few months. The tracks will be available from recording artists’ Web sites and through several established online music retailers, but Universal is excluding Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, the No. 1 online music retailer. Universal claims it is excluding Apple so that it can use the Apple store as a control group for measuring the impact on pricing, piracy and sales, but Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research, “There’s no doubt these guys are poking a stick at Apple,” adding:

“Clearly the handwriting is on the wall for DRM-protected content. We are seeing more of the players fall as they recognize that it’s just a hassle for the consumer and doesn’t really help the piracy problem.”

Especially as DRM cracking software is nearly as ubiquitous as porn online. (And DRM software is unpopular among many audiophiles for its perceived negative effects on sound quality, so it’s not just the evil music pirates working to strip musical tracks of their shackleware.)

Back during the days of the first Napster, I bought more major-label CDs (and even LPs) than I have at any time before or since. Napster enabled me to get MP3 copies of songs by artists who intrigued me, such as Nirvana and Sarah McLachlan and Luscious Jackson and the Dandy Warhols, so I could try before I bought the higher-fidelity CD versions. (I really hate shelling out $20 for a CD that might have one good song on it, don’t you?) In addition, Napster enabled me to acquire copies of tracks from LPs which, because of their obscurity and nonexistent market potential, will never officially make it to CD.

Nowadays, I don’t download music anymore, not unless it’s from a trusted source. I don’t buy major-label stuff, either. Instead, I buy music direct from the artist, and these days every street busker and bar musician who can play more than three chords on his or her guitar has piles of self-burned, self-marketed CDs sitting in the open axe case next to the pile of quarters, dollar bills and fivers.

The movie and music industries — and in many if not most cases, the major players are the same in both — have been freaking out at the prospect of the internet and the home computer destroying their market share. And so they have, but not in the way the movie/music moguls thought they would.

The moguls were and are scared shitless of us using the internet to pass their stuff around, movies and music, from computer to computer for free. But what we were really doing, much more than passing around their overproduced, overpriced, under-thought-out platinum-plated turds, was ignoring them in favor of other things. In the case of music, it’s meant getting our tunes from the artists themselves; in the case of movies, it’s meant forsaking films in favor of video games, which left movies in the dust profitwise half a decade ago (and which are about to do the same to the music industry) and which often have far more compelling storylines than the typical “blockbuster”.

And the thing is that they did this to themselves. If they’d been kinder to their musical artists — instead of screwing them over (the travails of the late Danny Gatton are particularly instructive) — they might not be as badly off as they are today, and the musicians might not all be deciding, in growing numbers, to go it alone rather than submit to major-label serfdom. But nooooo. It’s nice that they’re lowering the drawbridge, but they’re about seven years too late.

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