Ghettos

Courtesy of reader Steve R, the Washington Post has a pretty good write-up of the mess that DRM is making of the digital music market:

Ah, progress. It used to be that you just went out and bought a compact disc and you didn’t have to worry about whether it would work on your player.

These days, in the age of digital distribution, we don’t need to buy CDs anymore. What we have, instead, are a bunch of online music services, offering songs for sale or rent via quick download to a bunch of digital music players that might or might not actually play them.

Take music fan Chauncey Canfield: He has a whopping 180-gigabyte music collection, an iPod and a smartphone he can fill with songs from his subscription Yahoo Music account. But he can’t put Yahoo Music songs on his iPod, and he can’t put songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store on his phone.

Canfield knows that iTunes is the most popular online music store, but he avoids it because of the playback restrictions. Instead, he prefers to shop at eMusic, which sells its tracks in the MP3 format, an open technology that works on every music player on the market. Even the iPod.

“The fact that they don’t have [anti-piracy controls] on them is absolutely a major plus,” he said. “I don’t have to segregate my music into various ghettos.”

The rest of the article is equally good. The only thing that’s frustrating is that he never mentions the DMCA. DRM is not a fact of nature that magically prevents consumers from converting their music between different formats. The reason that incompatible DRM formats are such a pain in the butt is that writing a utility to transfer music from one format to another is effectively illegal. If the DMCA weren’t on the books, someone could write a slick little utility that would take the music in your iTunes folder and convert it to Plays for Sure or Zune formats. But because the DMCA prohibits circumvention regardless of the reason, that’s illegal, and so we’re stuck segregating our music into various ghettos.

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