Simon’s Blog

Perhaps you’ve already seen yesteday’s article about music and DRM written by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. Steve gets to the heart of the issue when he writes,

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.

Not only do there appear to be none. There are none. As corporate entities, the media companies have never really undersood how to develop great business models based around on-line distribution. As a result, they have always been laggards when it comes to adopting relevant new on-line technologies. I suspect Hanlon’s Razor applies:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

The question is - have the media finally companies finally woken up and smelt the coffee? Well, I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest they get it yet…

Of course, the same arguments that Steve Jobs uses for music, also apply to movies when distributed on-line; and on DVD; and on Blu-ray disc; and on HD DVD. All of which, almost always have some kind of DRM applied.

The bottom line is this. Excepting some very specific, and very niche business models, using DRM is the wrong thing to do. In fact, using DRM represents a massive net opportunity cost for media companies - it’s putting a real brake on their revenues and profits. Still, to be honest, I could care less. I’m more than happy to spend my money on things other than DRM’ed products. Just like everyone else is.