Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Warner Offers Music on Amazon Without Copy Protection

by Tim Stevens on December 28, 2007 at 02:32 PM

Amazon MP3
It sure looks like DRM, the record industry's digital music copy protection technology, is really dying. Wal-Mart is pushing record labels to ditch copy-protection from their tracks, Paul McCartney publicly hates the stuff, and even iTunes, which has sold more DRM-laden music than anyone else, is shifting away from protected tracks. Now Warner Music is joining in as well, finally selling tracks at Amazon's music store free of DRM nastiness.

DRM was created as an attempt to prevent people from sharing their digitally downloaded music with friends. However, it quickly became apparent that those who wanted to share music would find a way. It also became clear that DRM was only hurting those who tried to move their music to a new PC and found that it would no longer play. Much of this anti-DRM momentum can be attributed to Amazon itself, who launched its music store earlier this year and pledged from the beginning to only sell tracks that are not copy protected. While Amazon's success thus far pales in comparison to that of Apple's iTunes, that the site shuns DRM and also offers its tracks in the industry-standard MP3 format has made it quite popular among those who have non-Apple branded players.

Warner joins Universal Music Group and EMI at Amazon's store. This leaves Sony BMG as the odd man out, the only major label that has not signed up since the store launched in September. Sony has taken lots of heat for the extreme -- and possibly illegal -- tactics used to protect its music, so it's unsurprising that the company is late to the party on this one. But, the writing is on the wall, and if Sony doesn't come around soon it may find itself looking a little dated?

From BBC News

Related Links:

Tags: Amazon.com, DRM, iTunes, MP3, Warner Music, WarnerMusic

Comments

1

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular