P2P: no impact on album sales? EMI dumps DRM

On February 13, 2007, in Music, tech, by mugen

Well now. Isn’t this interesting? A recent study shows that even though album sales (which actually means SHIPPED, not SOLD) dropped by 80 million units, P2P probably only accounts for only 6 million of them. That’s excellent… and it reveals another HUGE problem with the music industry, in that they base everything on shipped units, not true sales.

It’s timely, given this study and Jobs’s comments last week and Schneier’s commentary on Vista, that EMI is moving toward dropping DRM altogether.

(For full disclosure, too… There have been issues with DRM and media with Macintosh computers for a long time. There are limits in Quicktime (especially copying still frames and clipping video), obviously there’s the DRM in iTunes, and other issues. None of these is as insidious nor as bloated as what Vista appears to be doing.)

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