DRM free music worth more than DRM'd-down music

We've been saying this for ages, but now there is a really good survey to prove it - putting DRM on music destroys value. Entertainment Media Research, working with media law firm Olswang, conducted lengthy online surveys with 1,700 UK music consumers, selected from a pre-existing panel of more than 300,000 music consumers in the UK (PDF: 2007 Digital Music Survey).

(I saw this on Ars Technica, their article says it all so I'll just quote it at length).

What makes this survey important is the fact that it was aimed squarely at the music-buying public, not the anti-RIAA crowd, not the techno-libertarians, and not our general readership. I've been told more than once that the views on DRM found at publications like Ars Technica are "not representative" of the general public. Perhaps this was once the case, but it can no longer be maintained generally. At least in the UK, the dirt on DRM is out, and it's spreading.

First, the bird's eye view: 68 percent of those with opinions on the matter say that the only music worth purchasing is that which is DRM-free. Yet less than half (39 percent) are willing to pay a little extra for it, while 18 percent say that they'd rather save a little dough and keep the DRM if they had to chose between the two. In the middle is a mass of people with no opinion on the matter, because they're not sure what DRM is or don't know their preference. That will likely soon change.

Familiarity with DRM has grown significantly in the last year. In 2006, more than half of respondents had never heard of DRM, but that number has dropped 16 percentage points in 2007, to 37 percent. The number of people who claimed to have a good or exact knowledge of DRM nearly tripled in that same timeframe.

This is the interesting point - familiarity - 2 years ago one could bang on about DRM and most people would look blankly at you, and in fact you would get more hostility than approbation because the people who cared most were those in the line to lose their livelihoods. Machiavelli summed this up well when he noted that:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger."

However, as mankind's experience levels rose, so did their incredulity lessen.....back to Ars Technica

Of those who have some idea of what DRM is, their views are largely—but not entirely—negative. 61 percent said that DRM "invades the rights of the music consumer to hear their music on different platforms." 49 percent called it a "nuisance," and 39 percent expressed concerns that DRM could have privacy implications. Despite this, 63 percent agreed that DRM "is a good idea because it protects copyrighted music from illegal file-sharers." In other words, the idea of stopping illegal file-sharing via DRM doesn't bother these consumers much, but the effect the effort is having on their own purchases is not appreciated.

This view isn't surprising. Few are those who, in principle, believe that all information (and content) should be "free"; the mainstream viewpoint is still staunchly in the "artists should be compensated" camp. This appreciation for the music business does not surmount all other concerns, however.

Consumers aren't interested in a "nuisance" for the sake of stopping file-sharers, and of course those of us who play closer attention to the world of DRM know that DRM actually does not stop file-sharing at all. As this general truth spreads, so does dissatisfaction.

The takeaway from the survey is that DRM's bad reputation is spreading among general music consumers, and there is a growing aversion to purchasing music that comes with DRM. Despite this, the general understanding of the struggle the industry faces with piracy is still somewhat positive among those same consumers. Still, given that file sharing in the UK is at an all-time high, it would appear that the the music industry needs to remove the digital locks on its tunes, and fast.

This is just another step in the overall restructuring of the media supply chain, where value is moving to the ends - media creation and media usage - as the "middle market" functions of aggregation and distribution increasingly commoditise. Resistance, as they say, is futile against forces such as these - one can expect the current Media industry to resist as long as possible - but failure to use the next few years restructure themselves around the new value chains will just lead to a more painful demise.

Postscript....the morning's trawl of Ars Technica has this piece on Universal experimenting with DRM Free music - apparently as much a poke in the eye to iTunes as anything else. However, this follows EMI's musings on the matter, so clearly the Big Guys already intellectually understand it destroys value - we suspect its just a matter of time now before DRM goes away (in music anyway - video is only starting to crawl up the learning curve, they've been protected to date by bandwidth not being avalable).