Warner Music Group drops DRM
Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 27 December 2007
Warner Music has bent beneath the force of the anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe. The label will now offer its complete catalog, DRM-free, through Amazon's new MP3 store.
The announcement means that EMI, Universal, and Warner now offer their catalogues in DRM-free digital formats, making Sony BMG (of rootkit fame) the lone holdout among the majors. Amazon now claims to offer for than 2.9 million songs in MP3 format from over 33,000 unique labels.
The entire movement to free music from DRM's shackles has had stunning success in 2007 after years in which such widespead moves to MP3 looked impossible. Could movies be next?
Afer years of crying how MP3 will bring them down because it lacks DRM, and after countless tries to enforce work-around DRM by violating official CD standards, the industry begins to realize that they can indeed make money and satisfy customers. Now I'd like to say "told ya", but I'm waiting until they realize that P2P doesn't hurt their business and the problem was their weird way of delivering crippled music.