News Microsoft wants to drop DRM too

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/04/10/microsoft_to_drop_drm_too/

 

Now if we could get the DRM off video products too.

 

What happens to all the music you have purchased with dRM on it. Are they going to unlock it for you ??

 

this will be stopped by the RIAA...... i bet the rest of my chocolate almonds.

 

A DRM free Zune player will be a genuine iPod competitor as the hardware itself is quite nice, with a lovely screen and simple interface.

I can't wait to see Zune v2 if Microsoft do eventually go DRM free, it's only a matter of time.

 

The user rejection of DRM seems to have pushed the manufacturers in to going this way with the labels, it is just a shame they did not listen at the start.
I guess they thouht it would only be the technical of us who would care, how wrong they were....
Power to the people is what I say.

 

the moral and nice thing to do would be to unlock all current drm protected music bought through legimate means, however i suspect that Apple wouldn't do it as they would be losing the tie in that existing consumers have to Apple products.

 

The problem is that it's not for Apple to make this decision.

 

When I saw the headline I was hoping that MS was trying to drop some of the DRM from Vista.

But at least the article points to the possibility of a "Plays For Sure" that actually "plays for sure". That would be good.

 

two fingers up? how about one finger?

 

A Zune player that could genuinely share music would be wicked, imagine a gig where the lead singer just holds up his Zune and says "this is our new single, enjoy!" and everyone in the audience recieves the mp3 there and then, now that would be something!

 

suppose but surely they would be able to have some leverage over songs that they have allready sold to existing customers.

 

Taken from here

Sure, DRM free would help the zune, but the iPod would win in the end...

 

Doesn't do a lot of good selling music drm free if its in a proprietary audio format (wma) that a number of your rivals (including the market leader) aren't compatable with.

 

I agree.

If iTunes had sold DRM free music from the beginning they would have potentially sold 100x the amount of music.

I remember reading recently that iTunes have sold roughly 20 songs for every iPod sold. Now considering how many iPods there are that number may still seem high, but the fact that people have preferred to load music onto their iPods by other means points to a serious problem.

Now that problem won't exist much longer, I think iTunes is going to explode.

 

Indeed.

However I would suggest .aac could become the standard format rather than .mp3 as it offers much better compression.

 

what about .ogg?

 

what about FLAC and getting some quality back in the scheme of things, I wonder if anyone else is seeing this like I am:
CD's (too expensive) > DRM'd downloads (lousy quality DRM more expensive) > non drm'ed downloads (lousey quality, even more expensive)

where are my better than cd quality cheaper than cds with no drm'ed downloads?

 

Perhaps better in terms of sound quality, but .aac has been supported for some time now amongst portable audio devices.

 

Far, far on the horizon unfortunately.

The average joe was satisfied with 128 bit-rate music for quite some time now, and the move to 256 was long overdue.