SAN FRANCISCO -- It's over. Restrictions on copying digital music are going to be history -- and all hell could break loose in the music retail business.

Amazon.com's (AMZN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) move to sell more than 2 million songs free of digital rights management software, or DRM, could well be seen several years from now as the point of no return for this controversial technology. The days of music companies telling consumers when and how they can listen to their songs are numbered.

It won't happen overnight. Amazon's move is -- to lean on that useful but overused buzz phrase -- a tipping point. DRM is a well-intentioned idea that served to drive many music consumers away.

You can debate all day long whether DRM is good or bad, but all the arguments are moot. The market has spoken. DRM hurts sales. And that's bad for business.

Amazon's DRM-free store is launching on the same day that Virgin Digital, Sir Richard Branson's stab at an iTunes clone, is being shuttered.

It wasn't long after some music labels started experimenting with selling DRM-free music that they started to see a substantial increase in sales.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of DRM has been Apple (AAPL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr). As Daniel Del'Re pointed out in his coverage of the Amazon announcement, when people buy songs on iTunes, "the only portable music device on which users can play back songs is the iPod."

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nice thing to hear soon all of the hard work will pay off and we will be rid of the diseased animal called drm.

I'm almost there (with amazon.com), but I still can't bring myself to pay $1 for a compressed file. Even at 320kbps, that's losing 75% of the data. Maybe most people can't hear that, but my experience is that it saps a subtle life and sparkle out of the music. So until they offer FLAC or WAV at that price, I'm still holding out. But this is more attractive than anything offered before.

Re: "... my experience is that it [compressing a music file] saps a subtle life and sparkle out of the music."

I totally agree.
I go even further and contend that since music is a continuous wave file, digital sampling even at high kbps is not a true representation. (I hate compromise.)
I listen to some CDs, but mostly vinyl.

I know; I'm weird.
(But I don't care, and that's important.)

"I go even further"
should have been:
"I go even further than most people"
(I wasn't referring to autodidact).

Hooray!

The other story (completely different and twice funny for me being no P2P user at all, but again on wrong "defenders" being treated the way they should): http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-emails-leaked-070915/

Re: "... my experience is that it [compressing a music file] saps a subtle life and sparkle out of the music."


Then how would you describe the effects of a Fairchild tube compressor on uncompressed audio signals? How come recording studios pay $10,000 for a monophonic tube audio compressor?

I think there is a distinct difference between compressing the individual tracks (vocals and drums in particular) and compressing the finished mix.

Plenty of studios compress the finished mix. They do make stereo compressors.

compression is an effect. I have made mp3's with pre-emphasis on highs and lows that sound, to my ears , better than the original.

"If it sounds good and tests bad, you have tested the wrong thing."

Daniel Recklinhausing, chief engineer, HH Scott Company.

Sometimes the quality of music lies in the ear of the listener.

"If it sounds good and tests bad, you have tested the wrong thing."

Or your testing TECHNIQUE may be flawed.

Plenty of studios compress the finished mix.

Ah, I see you've heard cuts from the new Springsteen album.

That was a good one, George!
(clever and right on the money)

I have never heard a Bruce Springstein album. Don't plan to.

Re: "cuts from the new Springsteen album"

Despite the poor studio job on some of the songs, a few of them do have good potential for performing live. (I think George has already alluded to this previously in the recent past.)

Er, I know, we probably shouldn't be focusing on RIAA indentured servants who are under contract as musicians-for-hire by greedy, oppressively unfair corporations, but I still feel it justifiable to attend a few concerts now and then (since a good chunk of that money still goes to the artist).

Anyone reading this, feel free to chide me about my take on this kind of stuff.

soon drm will just be a festering corpse that no one wants to touch.

I wasn't referring to dynamic compression. I was referring to data compression. LOL.

I meant taking a digital file that contains a data point for every sample (in the case of CD, 44,100 samples for every second of music), and applying an algorithm to shrink the file size that will be irreversible -- i.e. some of the original data is inevitably lost. Lossy digital compression. Such a process, be it AAC or MP3 or WMA or OGG, may have measurably the same dynamics -- the same variation in ouput voltage from soft to loud in the music. Still, it sounds lacking to me. You hear a loss of subtle cues that identify the original recording venue, for example. And you lose subtle harmonics on instruments -- a real drum sounds more like a synthesized drum. The distinctive sound of wood on "skin" is blurred.

And so on.

Hmm, I'll be interested in reading leflaw's response to what autodidact just wrote!

pessimist, if I was a millionaire playboy, I would probably listen almost exclusively to vinyl. I agree with what you're saying about the dicontinuity of digital "samples" compared to an analog signal. However, I listen now to CDs and MP3s almost exclusively, just because vinyl is expensive and not terribly practical for me. What I find most distressing is that sound quality of most pop music releases is in decline. Kelly Clarkson's latest (not that I'm a big fan, but I've heard the CD) sounds like a copy of a bad cassette tape. Arghh.

i'm glad drm is dead

I used to be a millionaire playboy.