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Rock Music is Now the Establishment

In an interview with Out-Law.com, Blur drummer Dave Rowntree notes:

“DRM [copy protection] was doomed to fail because the people who it was designed to stop, as in the counterfeiters or the mass file sharers or the people doing it for political reasons could easily bypass it [] but the people who were caught in the trap of DRM were the ordinary people who wanted to play their CDs on their computer as well as their CD recorder or who wanted to make a tape of it to put on in the car who were doing things that most people regardless of the law would regard as legitimate activities. ”

Not surprisingly, these are the same copyright concerns I voiced last November on the David Lawrence Show. Near the end of the show I stated the present iTunes DRM strategy simply was not viable and a change would happen within a year. As I predicted, Apple is now offering a non-DRM version of iTunes music and sales are climbing.

States Dave Rowntree “[The music industry has] become very much the establishment…by the time that the industry was starting to fight what they saw as the war against file sharing they really weren’t in anybody’s good books any more, they didn’t have the goodwill of the people whose behaviour they were trying to control.”

Look for more music providers to quickly follow suit or become non-players.

Brett Trout

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