Monday, February 12, 2007

Music Sales Would Explode Without DRM

Music Sales Would Explode Without DRM:Without restrictions on entire catalogs, "Sales would explode," says David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, the No. 2 online music retailer behind Apple's iTunes. "DRM has been holding the market back." His company is the only legitimate digital music service selling unrestricted songs, in the MP3 format.

Although eMusic's subscription model does not fit well my rather bursty music-buying habits, I have great respect for their strong stance against DRM. Without DRM, there would be a lot more competition between online music stores, and between device makers. Stores and players could more easily compete on format quality once compression formats are decoupled from DRM. Of course, competition may be exactly what some of the players here do not want...

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