Media Reports
MP3 Triumphs as DRM Expires
By Barry Fox
What a climb down. After years of rejecting MP3 because it has no DRM copy-protection, the record companies have now owned up to the fact that DRM turns off innocent customers while doing next to nothing to stop copying—for instance, by ripping the analog output of a protected player.
When the first MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, was launched in 1998, the record companies saw MP3 as the devil incarnate. It had been developed by the Fraunhofer Institute, and licensed by Thomson, without any copy protection or Digital Rights Management. The RIAA, trade body for the record companies, sued and lost.
The music and electronics industries set up the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) to try and find a way of copy-protecting formats such as MP3. The plan was to bury a supposedly inaudible digital watermark in the music waveform to control copying and distribution over the Internet by telling a player not to play an unauthorized copy. Representatives of over 200 companies regularly flew around the world for SDMI meetings.
The watermark scheme was extended to the then-new super audio format DVD-Audio. The hi-fi fraternity doubted that the audio mark could be inaudible. Because DVD-Audio flopped we never found out who was right.
Computer scientist Ed Felten of Princeton University soon showed that the SDMI’s watermarks could be removed from music, making protection worthless. Things then turned very nasty when the SDMI, RIAA, and Verance Corporation (the watermark developer) threatened Felten with legal action. The RIAA again had to back down and in 2001 Felten published his research. Soon after that the SDMI sunk without a trace.
This left the record companies unable to agree on a strategy for legally selling MP3 downloads, and in April 2003 Apple started to roll out the iTunes service. This uses Apple’s proprietary DRM called FairPlay with AAC, the Advanced Audio Coding system which Fraunhofer helped develop as a more efficient compression system than MP3.
By refusing to license FairPlay, Apple put the record companies in a stranglehold; and locked consumers into Apple’s iTunes world.
The record companies are now walking backward to MP3. Even though it is less efficient than AAC, everyone and their dog knows what MP3 means, everything plays MP3s, and Apple has no control over anything to do with it.
So MP3 is an easy sell.
But MP3 still has no DRM or copy-protection. Once a download has been sold to one person, it is anybody’s. It can be copied to as many PCs or portables as the user wishes and burned to CDs or sent over the Internet. The only financial reward is from the first download.
The big about-face was typified when—late last year—seven of the UK’s major music download retailers (7digital.com, Digitalstores.co.uk, HMV.com, Play.com, Tescodigital.com, Tunetribe.com, and the now defunct Woolworthsdownload.co.uk) committed to a new logo—“MP3 compatible.” The logo tells consumers that downloads will play on every PC and every Mac and portable digital music player.
The campaign was devised by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), the trade association whose members account for more than 90% of UK sales of music, DVD, and computer games.
Digitalstores.co.uk CEO Russel Coultart said: “We now want to take the message out to music fans that they can legally buy downloads which are not locked to specific players or computers or mobile phones.”
Says 7digital.com CEO Ben Drury, “The beauty of an MP3 file is that once you have bought it, you don’t need to be a computer genius or a lawyer to make it work and you are not locked in to a relationship with a single retailer or hardware manufacturer.”
Adds Coultart, “We are in discussions with music retail organizations around the world to make “MP3 compatible” an international standard.”
The campaign is also supported by the UK record companies’ trade association, the BPI—Britain’s equivalent of the RIAA.
Says Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive, “This logo will not only help give consumers confidence that the music files they are buying will play on a wide range of devices, but will also help them know that they are legal and that artists are getting paid.”
ERA explains: “MP3 formats have no DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions which means there is no limit to the number of devices or computers you can transfer the track onto.”
Of course what the ERA does not explain is that MP3 files can also be copied any number of times—which is precisely why the record companies previously spurned MP3.
So I asked ERA and the BPI how the new MP3 promotion scheme can be reconciled with earlier fears and hostility.
The BPI says it was never officially “pro-DRM” and left it to the
record companies to make their own choices. So the BPI’s position hasn’t changed, though we can reasonably infer that the labels have relaxed their licensing conditions.
The BPI’s official line is that “DRM still plays an important role when it supports innovative business models, in particular on mobile and subscription platforms, but as the only interoperable format currently on the market, MP3 is becoming the standard for à la carte downloads and we firmly support progressive initiatives that promote licensed services to music fans.”
Says ERA: “We have been lobbying the record industry for the adoption of MP3 as the standard download format for the past couple of years. We see MP3 as the “CD of the digital music world”—(and) over the past months record companies have increasingly been licensing tracks in the MP3 format and that has been a key reason for the proliferation of download services.
“The adoption of MP3 is good for the consumer.”
Unfortunately, promoting MP3 as the “CD of the digital music world” could help kill off CD. Amazon has already helped kill off record stores and has now jumped on the MP3 bandwagon—offering “millions of songs and albums”—all in MP3 format and free from DRM limitations.
Amazon MP3 works with the same easy-to-use shopping basket system as the rest of the Amazon site. Click “Buy” and downloads are added to the user’s personal basket, along with any books, DVDs, or CDS.
“Once you’ve downloaded your music, you can use whichever media player application you prefer to manage it, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player,” assures Amazon. “Our files are free of digital rights management (DRM) software, so you can burn your songs to CDs, play them on all your computers, and transfer them to all your devices.”
Encoding is at 256 kbps, which is reasonably close to CD quality. Top albums start from £3 (about $4.91) and many tracks are only 59p, which undercuts iTunes.
iTunes is, of course, now offering DRM-free music, too.
It would here be useful to hear what the record companies’ world trade body, the IFPI, thinks about the backtracking on DRM.
The IFPI’s HQ is based in London along with the BPI. When American Jason Berman headed the IFPI, he held regular press briefings, with a round table conference, factual presentations, question and answer exchanges, and personal networking.
When Brit John Kennedy took over in January 2005, he did a legacy Berman-style briefing, and another a year later with restricted invite list. Then he stopped doing them.
This comes at a time when the record companies are hurting, brick and mortar stores closing, and DRM-free free-to-copy music is on offer as high quality downloads.
It also comes with the news that Stanford University has been running tests on incoming students each year. The students listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 upwards. And each year the preference for 128 kbps MP3 “sizzle” increases. You can read the whole sorry tale here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205
If you feed people junk food from birth, they will want junk food. But then one day, when they taste something better, the taste buds may wake up. Let’s hope the same goes for a diet of 128k MP3.M3
Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.