Yahoo! Music Chief Dave Goldberg thoughts of the usage of digital rights management (DRM) holding back the music industry heard at the start of the year – Music 2.0 conference in LA is slowly starting to gain support (comments). At the same Music 2.0 conference, Ted Cohen, EMI’s the top digital music guru noted several times that DRM is necessary to moving legal downloads forward. (”The DRM makes the business model possible,” he said. “Without DRM, you can’t have the business models and give people choices.”) Give people choices? Who is he trying to kid? Even with our current technological advancement, ‘legal’ digital music is no where near as convenient as ‘illegal digital music’. For the price of inconvenience by ‘legal’ digital music – an extra cost for the less than ideal DRM solution.

Fast forward during the year 2006, Yahoo! Music after the mildly success of a personalized version of the Jessica Simpson single A Public Affair and Jessie McCartney’s album Right Where You Want Me will team up with EMI’s Blue Note to ‘test’ MP3 sales of Norah Jones’ new single Thinking About You. Ted Cohen, formerly EMI’s digital guru and now independent digital media consultant is singing a different tune. Ted Cohen now believes that the Jones’ test was “a nice first step”, but said the company hadn’t gone far enough. Funny how much a year can change for a guru!

At which point I wonder have Music Record Labels, Solutions Providers, DRM Providers or Digital Music Retailers ever thought of the end user. What is important to the end user? What are end users looking for? With the end goal/objective in mind, what have the Music Record Labels, Solutions Providers, DRM Providers or Digital Music Retailers done? Are they working together?

To be honest, I have not fully appreciate the reasons why people would pay for ‘legitimate music’. Why would I spent any money to purchase a clearly inferior product. At some point, my purchased music will either fail me in four accounts: -

A) Devices -

• If I purchased my music via iTunes, I won’t be able to play it in Microsoft’s Zune. I might owned an iPod today but my music now ‘restricts’ my choice of purchase.
• If I purchased my music via a mobile device – under the current widely used OMA 1.0, I will not have the ability to transfer my music to PC. My music now ‘restricts’ where I can play the purchased music (on a memory-limited and currently imperfect device for listening to music might). What if I were to upgrade my phone (and I do, every year… I lose my music). There are DRM solutions which meet the above specific needs (i.e. SIM bound), but now, I’m ‘restricted’ to that particular DRM solution.

B) Format -

• A lesser problem than say audio visual… but there are no standardized format currently, OGG, MP3, aac, aacPlus, enhanced aacPlus, WMA etc.

C) Location & Time -

• We live in a global world now – moving constantly with often short-notices. I can no longer afford to purchase and keep a 200 CD collection (or worse, tapes!). What will I do, now that I’m in Beijing for an unconfirmed period of time… or like my buddy in the Netherlands, who for the last 2 years have moved every 6 months to a new country. Yet the music we have are precious, and provokes memories/emotions.

To cap off, MuSMo was founded to cater our needs first… clearly none of the above comments are NEW, but we will boldly step forward to suggest our thoughts on how we can all contribute to a more complete music experience.