More important than the personalization of the track is the fact that the song is available in MP3 format, and can thus be freely copied on any type of portable music player or other MP3 capable device, burned on a CD etc. Yahoo! is actively trying to persuade record labels to sell music in MP3 format with little success.
"Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform," says Ian C. Rogers of Yahoo! Music, and continues "We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!"
Indeed the extra $1.00 in the prize of the personalized track comes from personalization, not the fact that it's in MP3 format. Rogers thinks that an un-restricted MP3 song is more valuable than a heavily limited DRM track, and should hence be prized somewhere between $0.99 and $1.99.
Hopefully Yahoo! (and other online music stores) manage to convince the labels eventually, and we can all buy digital music that we can actually use. I would definitely prefer buying music in MP3 format over Audio CDs, especially with all the copy protected discs lying around making it difficult at times to spot the actual Audio CDs from the round plastic decoys.
Source:
Yahoo! Music Blog
Written by: Jari Ketola @ 21 Jul 2006 3:15
