It looks like Q-Trax might be dead before it starts. This is a disappointment as I truly believe it could have been a service that was good for the music industry, artists and consumers. In a comment to my article Peter J made some good points about the impact to GNC if its content was available for free (i.e. without GNC advertising) through another source. If this happened it would indeed reduce the return to Todd as the people that consumed the content elsewhere would not come to GNC to see it.
Sony could not help but hear the commentary on its decision to release DRM free music in the worst way possible, just about every media outlet and blog panned them severely. Less than a week later they have announced they will be also releasing DRM free tracks on Amazon.com. If I was Best Buy, Target and other retailers I would be a bit annoyed (to say the least). It is a better move by Sony though.
I hope everyone that was celebrating holidays had a great time. With 42C heat New Years in Melbourne was as much an endurance event as a celebration (110F for the unmetricated). The music industry did not enjoy a Merry Christmas with revenues down 20% over the last holiday season. The reasons for this will surprise no-one. A move to online
And realise that fighting your customers is not good for business. Warner Brothers now joins EMI and a limited Universal in recognising that the goal of a company should be to make their product easy for customers to use, and allow them to use it as much as they can. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman claims the music industry was wrong to start a fight with consumers.
A story from a week or so ago in Forbes talks about how the new Radiohead album is being extensively pirated. Seems ironic for an album that you can legally get for free would need to be pirated, especially not at volume of an estimated 500,000 downloads.
Their is significant speculation that EMI is going to announce at 1pm in London that they are going to be allowing a significant portion of their catalog to be distributed DRM free.
In short a music lover who has spent $20,000 in purchased music over a lifetime recently purchased some music online that was wrapped in DRM. Two hours later he is so fed up he is ready to violate the law. Read this and tell me that DRM has not hurt the music industry. consumerist.com