Online Media Cultist

DRM, Digital Rights Management, is a technical means of restricting the use of media. In other words, it can control how many times an MP3 can be played, for example, or how many devices it can be played on, how many times it can be downloaded, and so on.

This was thought to be a great way for music labels to distribute music online while protecting their intellectual property. The problem is that people don’t like DRM, and many hate it. When you purchase a CD, your expectation is that you can play it at home, in the car, at the office, and while on the exercise bike at the gym. People therefore expect to be able to do whatever they want with a legally purchased MP3.

And the reality of course is that music labels are hemorrhaging cash anyway. Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, opened the floodgates to lifting DRM restrictions in a well written essay several months back that urged the labels to allow music to be sold on iTunes DRM-free.

Now we’re starting to see some major changes in the works. Wal-Mart, one of the biggest brick-and-mortar sellers of music, announced that it had signed on with a bunch of labels to offer DRM-free music for purchase online.

Meanwhile, start-up gBox is looking to tap into the new DRM-free wave by offering a service that lets people create wish lists and purchase DRM-free MP3s for friends.

Beyond music purchase, streaming services – both free and paid – are now plentiful. The thinking here is that people don’t really need to “own” music anymore if they can access whatever they want whenever they want it, and from wherever. Rhapsody, which has been around for quite a while, has hooked up with Viacom (and MTV, which it owns) in an effort to penetrate a larger share of this growing market.

And services like Anywhere.fm are creating ways to access your iTunes library from anyplace with an Internet connection.

GigaOM notes that EMI Music and Universal Music Group are already offering DRM-free music, and that “When it comes to DRM free music — that is, music not encumbered by copyright restrictions — the pitchers are still throwing their warm-up pitches.” And Techdirt rightly points out that people can care less what label music is released through – they just want what they want, and will flock to wherever that need can be best met.

Personally, I’m old school and like the feeling of “owning” my music. However, I believe the future of online music will be for the most part free, streaming, and advertising-supported. Think about a service that allows you instantly access any song you want in the known universe from wherever you want, whenever you want. Maybe the basic service is free with some relatively unobtrusive ads, and a paid subscription layer that lets you download a set number of songs (DRM-free, of course!) each month, create favorite lists, advanced social networking features, and so on.

I think that’s where things are headed, and we’re just at the very beginning of this process.