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Yahoo! Music Offers DRM-free Song
Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 3:00 PM - by Jeff Gamet
Yahoo! Music is offering Jessica Simpson's A Public Affair as a Digital Rights Management-free MP3 download. The offer is a one-time promotional deal with the Epic record label, according to Wired.
Instead of the typical US$0.99 per song, Yahoo! Music is charging $1.99 for the copy protection-free version. Without any copy protections, there is no mechanism in place to stop listeners from making copies of the song, burning CDs, or listening to it on a portable music player.
Buyers also get to customize the song by adding their own name to the lyrics.
Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers commented in the company's music blog "As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the compact disc) or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform."
Although the move to offer a copy protection-free song looks like a move towards a more open music download market, it's more likely just another promotional gimmick. Most record labels are holding on to their music assets tightly for fear of losing revenue to unauthorized downloads and copies.
In comparison, Apple's iTunes Music store offers a free promotional song every week that is encoded with its FairPlay copy protection - a more palatable option for the music labels.
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