Amazon Will Enter the DRM-Free Music Market
This is exciting not just because DRM blows, but because having more than one major DRM-free vendor in the market will serve as a market counterweight to iTunes’ "OK, we’ll take off the DRM, but charge you 30% more" calculus.
A lot of my opposition to DRM stems from not from some high-minded principle, but the simple fact that I use a lot of different devices to listen to music. I have a desktop machine, a laptop with a virtual machine running inside of it, a couple of iPods, a couple of car CD players, and our Tivo, and I want to listen to my music on all of them. I don’t care to have to have a debate with all those devices over whether I have permission to listen the music I paid for on them.
These days I’m getting most of my music from eMusic, sans DRM. I have the plan that lets you download 50 songs per month, which I originally thought would be too much for me but I’m discovering is just about right for my habits. The 50 song plan is US$14.99 per month, which works out to about US$0.30 per DRM-free song — an incredible value compared to iTunes. (eMusic has monthly plans as cheap as $9.99/month, and you can buy "booster packs" that let you download additional tracks if you run out of downloads for the month, which I did last month. The nice thing about the booster packs is that unlike your monthly downloads, you can download booster pack downloads whenever you want.)
After two years of subscribing to Yahoo Music Jukebox I did unsubscribe from that service yesterday. Dwindling usage combined with an unfortunately-timed price hike made me realize that continuing to pay for this wasn’t a terrific idea for me. I still like the concept of renting music, though, I’m just not wild about the execution in this case. If I jump back into a music rental service it’s going to need to be much cheaper than purchasing tracks and it’s going to somehow need to provide me with a dramatically better discoverability experience than anything else that’s out there today.
I did buy the new They Might Be Giants CD on iTunes yesterday, but only because I couldn’t get it anywhere else. Were it not for the fact that some magic anti-DRM faeries descended upon my PC and converted the DRM-crippled iTunes music to MP3 so I could listen to it on my Tivo, I’d have waited until the album came out somewhere else.
If Amazon applies what they know about discoverability to their music store, I could see myself buying a lot of music there. Hopefully it’ll be better than their initial stab at movies — I’m not seeing a lot of Amazon recommendations for Unbox movies from Amazon today, and their browse experience still isn’t as good as Netflix’s, but it’s early days. Hopefully this will get better over time.
