Why DRM Won't Be Floating With Music Lovers In the Cloud
One thing that really bugs me is a $ multi-billion company telling me I can't share music with my family. Ever since its inception, iTunes has been doing this very thing. Citing Digital Rights Management (DRM), which provides a set fee for each download of MP3 to go to music companies, they claim that if I make a copy of the latest Arcade Fire recording and give it to my husband, I'm somehow screwing the artists out of a living.
They know and I know that if my husband hears my MP3 across the room or if he hears it on a CD I burned for him, it makes no difference. Nothing was compromised but some burning circuits in a record company executive's head. So, it was with great excitement that I read about the new Amazon Cloud Drive. You take your favorite music, upload it to Amazon's cloud, and then tap into it wherever you are, whenever you feel like it. But they have a caveat—no DRM-protected music, please.
"Wait!" I thought. "That's just about all my iTunes library!" And then, I thought some more. Because if this cloud-based music service is going to take off even half as well as I'm guessing, iTunes is the company that's going to have to start bending its rules. People aren't going to stand around wringing their hand and crying, "We WISH we could use Amazon's service, but bad, mean iTunes won't let us, because of DRM." I think that instead, a revolution is coming. Customers are going to demand that they get their music free and clear of red tape. They want it to store in the cloud and they are going to find a way to get it there.
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