Delicate Genius Blog

This is potentially very cool

Yahoo! Music is offering mp3 downloads.

From Ian Rogers (Yahoo!):

As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.

We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway! And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.

This is a great positive start. Yahoo! is really considering the end consumer here. Wow, a media company that actually respects its customer. Never thought I’d see the day.

Not to mention that if they can pull it off, they’ll have a huge edge on the market. The end consumer is faced with locked-in DRM’ed music vs free to use anywhere music. It might just bring a whole bunch of new customers to the market. Customers like myself.

It will be a challenge, how on earth do they think they’re going to convince the major labels to release their music in a non DRM’ed format? The majors are clearly hell bent on “protecting their property”. Will be interesting to watch.

If anything, it’s great hook to get attention for their new customised mp3 imitative. Ohh, yeah forgot to mention. This was all to promote the fact that you can buy an mp3 a Jessica Simpson track where she sings your name (or a predefined list of names). I checked – they don’t have Joey Jo Jo Jr Shabadoo :-)

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-dg