TowerThe news just keeps getting worse for e-bookers and others who want to build their businesses around DRM—at least if the music industry is any harbinger.

First digital music started killing CD sales, one reason for the woes of Tower Records. Now consumers are rebelling against the copy-restrictions that prevent them from playing Madonna or Brittany Spears on all their devices. They are turning to pirated music or ripping songs off their CDs as best they can, and that’s hurting the DRM-infested offerings of iTunes and similar companies, which cannot make up for the decline.

iTune sales ‘collapsing’: Digital flatline looks ominous for music labels is the latest headline in the Register. The guys at Sony and other parts of DRM Land—Dream Land?—might also check out Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead – Peter Jenner. He was first manager of Pink Floyd and is secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum.

In the next two or three years, according to Jenner, blanket licensing arrangements will prevail in most countries, with customers able to pay a bit extra for the right to swap music. He’s not the only one concerned about DRM’s poisonous effect on music sales and the need for alternatives. Mike Smith, who runs Columbia UK, predicts that DRM-free music will prevail in 12 months. Oh, this is fun. None other than Sony—yes, the Rootkit perp as well as maker of the “protection”-hobbled Sony Reader—owns Columbia UK. People in the music business are smartening up. Even Hilary Rosen, former president of the RIAA, now understands that DRM is a meal ticket not for content-providers but for the companies hawking it.

Uh-oh. What if publishers start feeling the same? Remember, Adobe and the rest are depending on DRM to differentiate themselves from competitors—I wonder how much Adobe really want the International Digital Publishing Forum to come up with a DRM standard. Meanwhile other threats are arising. For example, what if good open-source creation tools and related software end up displacing proprietary programs? Without proprietary DRM holding back the e-book industry, this becomes much easier.

Related: EMI’s DRMless Norah Jones music: Great example for Random House, S&S and the rest. If nothing else, remember the classic Catch-22 argument against DRM in the book business. Bootleggers won’t bother that much with obscure books, so publishers might as well leave them unprotected—so it’s easier for readers to own them. And best-sellers? Well, the bootleggers will just scan paper books.

(Thanks to Jane at DearAuthor.com.)

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5 COMMENTS

  2. I’d be just nearly as happy as anyone else to see the demise of Digital Resrictions Management in the marketplace, but we’ll have to do better than cite Andrew Orlowski articles to make our argument.

    In particular, if you want to track growth or decline in sales of goods like these, you need to account for the season. Lots of goods sell in much bigger quantities in some parts of the year (such as just before and after Christmas) than others. If someone can show what sales are doing now vs. the same time a year ago, then I’ll take interest.

  3. I agree, John. More detail will help. I meant to link to the article from the start—I’ve just fixed that—now here’s part of what was on the first page:

    The leading DRM digital download service, Apple’s iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.

    Secretive Apple doesn’t break out revenues from iTunes, but Forrester conducted an analysis of credit card transactions over a 27-month period. And this year’s numbers aren’t good.

    While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent. The previous spring’s rebound wasn’t repeated this year.

    And it isn’t just Apple’s problem. Nielsen Soundscan has grimmer news for prospective digital download services, indicating three consecutive quarters of flat or declining revenues for the sector as a whole.

    Speaking to The Register, Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff warned against extrapolating too much from the figures.

    It may reflect a seasonal bounce that hasn’t yet manifested itself. However, it might not.

    Thanks,
    David

  4. I think there must be a “got it” effect for music media.
    Once people have bought their backlist in a new medium
    (like CD’s or iTunes AAC), a process that probably takes
    a few years, their purchasing should taper off to a slower
    rate controlled by the rate of entry of new music and the
    rate of entry of new customers. I can’t imagine anyone
    would expect the purchase rate of iTunes to have the same
    stable rate as it would have in the first few years. So this
    is minor news; the real story is what the stable rate is, and
    how long it took to get there.

    (Still, by the way, hating this right-side border strip which
    overlays the comment editing window…)

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