Ramblings of a Dashing Host: Labels

Sony BMG, the last DRM holdout of the big 4 major music labels, famous for the root-kit scandal, has finally caved! (but not completely) Sony will be offering at least part of its catalog DRM-free in the first quarter of this beautiful new year of ours. Again this is only for the Amazon store so far and only in the United States. With Macworld in a couple of weeks, we could be seeing a similar announcement for iTunes. But I would like to take a minute to talk about us Canadians. Too often are we pushed to the side because we are a relatively small market (32 million compared to 300 million) or treated as a nation of pirates because our copyright system hasn't been updated to deal with our new digital world. I don't mean to pontificate but here are a few facts:

Digital music sales growth in Canada has surpassed that of the U.S. for the second year in a row. This year with 73% compared to 45%.
Digital Album sales growth this year has been 93% for Canada and 53% in America.
Album sales decline in the last year has been 9.5% in the U.S. of A. and, wait for it.... only 6.4% in Canada.

Give us a break already and be good neighbors!

D.E.

Source: Businessweek / Michael Geist's Blog

Ever since Steve Jobs called on the music labels to remove DRM from their digital music sales, the labels have been seeing the light and falling in line. Though it hasn't been amazing for the iTunes Music Store so far (cross your fingers for Macworld!), Amazon has greatly benefited from it, now receiving the entire Warner music catalog DRM-free. Warner Music Group representative said, "We believe that giving consumers the assurance that the music they purchase can be played on any device they own will only encourage more sales of music." Glad to see they're finally getting the picture! Warner's catalog combined with EMI's (in March) and Universal's (in August) catalogs, now puts the Amazon's store's repertoire at a total of 2.9 million DRM-free tracks. Not too shabby at all. Problem is, and this is probably due to the music labels, Amazon's DRM-free store is only available in the United States. When will they understand that these kinds of tactics only hurt those who actually purchase their music and not those who wish to pirate? And while I'm at it, I'll just add that Canada isn't a nation of pirates. I'll refer you to Michael Geist's little video for that argument. But then again, Amazon's store may just be a test shop. Here's hopin' there's more good news in the coming year...

D.E.

Source: Wired

Image Source: Greg Palmer on Flickr