DRM sucks redux: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys. PlayForSure has to be one of the biggest fuck-up misnomer brands ever. via ram.

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store - New York Times. i guess that means DRM for music is officially dead.

Amazon Adds Warner Music to DRM-Free Roster. one more major label to go.

David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music. great photo at the top of the article. via josh.

Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else | CNET News.com. a bill related to college funding and scholarships also requires schools to show that they’re deterring piracy and offering alternatives. I wonder what the total cost is to get any asinine stipulation in a bill?

MLB rips off fans who bought DRM videos - Boing Boing. they switched DRM providers and all old licenses just don’t work anymore. MLB is so ass backwards.

I actually believe that illegal downloading, for a band like us, means that more people hear us. We don’t really make money off our record sales anyway. People have been giving us money lately: “Here’s ten dollars; I shouldn’t have downloaded your music illegally.” It’s funny, really.
- Aaron Dessner, bassist for The National

Amazon MP3 Downloads. 2 million DRM-free 256kbps MP3s available. most singles are 99c, most albums $9.99. top 100 songs and singles are 89c and $8.99.

Jane Siberry’s “you decide what feels right” pricing - (37signals). an artist who sells her music on her site at whatever price you want. has stats on what people actually pay.

BBC NEWS | DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion. digg still sucks but this is hilarious.

Zunior.com - the little digital music store v2. there’s lots of good stuff here. $8.88 for entire albums. 192kbps MP3. Add $2 for flac files.

EMI goes DRM-free on iTunes Store. $1.29 for 256kbps AAC files. i’d think this was an april fools joke if i didn’t see multiple sources.

Harvey Danger - Why We’re Releasing Our New Album for Free on the Internet. i didn’t know they were on barsuk.

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Music. is it just me, or did he just politely tell just about everyone to fuck off?

GigaOM » Something about Zune & Sharing. “There are now reports that nearly 40% of the songs purchased or acquired through the ZunePass cannot be shared.” yet another “fuck you” from Universal Music.

» Napster founder commerce enables unprotected MP3s on MySpace | ZDNet.com. money + drm-free + myspace = tipping point? and the format has their album for sale this way.

yahoo sells a single drm-free mp3

Yahoo is selling a new Jessica Simpson single in mp3 format (with no DRM) and it’s personalized to specific names. I made the list of names but poor Ramanan did not. I know he’ll be crying himself to sleep this evening.

There’s two things about this that strike me as quite interesting. First, it’s a prime example of the massive amount of customization that the music industry could exploit online. I just finished reading The Long Tail by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. It details how there is a lot of money to be made in niches, even niches as small as 1 person (or in this case, 1 name). The second interesting part is this post on yahoo’s music blog. They’re bascially begging the music industry to let them create an emusic competitor. They also make a great point about how DRM adds nothing since labels already sell DRM-free music in the form of CDs. Maybe there’s a chance the labels will come to their senses and give this a try. The Carrot: major labels realizing that DRM really just means they’re locked into iTunes. The Stick: companies like Yahoo saying it’s the only way to compete with Apple.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film fans get permanent downloads. So you buy the dvd and you get to download a digital copy for free right away. this is such a good idea that I’m amazed any movie studio agreed to it. Although the content won’t work on ipod or psp, it’s a great step in the right direction. It also begs the question ‘why Amazon isn’t doing this?’