Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM
The last major label will throw in the towel on digital rights management and prepare to fight Apple for valuable download revenues — In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sony BMG has been the last holdout in an exodus that began in earnest when Reuters reported in early 2007 that the ailing music business was set to relax digital restrictions, followed by Warner Music Group dropping DRM at the end of December 2007. With EMI and Universal already selling unprotected tracks, Business Week's report would leave Sony BMG as the final major label still conditioning downloads on copy protection.
The timing carries extra weight for this label: Sony BMG spent late 2005 fighting the fallout of its rootkit DRM debacle before settling the legal nightmare that followed. The story also traveled unusually widely for a rumor — Ars Technica picked it up the same day, framing Sony BMG as the lone holdout whose own support channels had pointed users to DRM circumvention tools.
First-order effects
- Sony BMG's catalog becomes sellable as unprotected MP3s across rival stores, ending Apple's position as the only convenient way to buy that music for an iPod.
- The move puts Sony BMG in direct competition with Apple for download revenue rather than licensing to it on Apple's terms.
Second-order effects
- DRM-free supply undercuts the premise of the confirmed class-action against Apple, which alleges the company uses technological restrictions on the iPod and iTunes Store to shut out competitors — if no label imposes locks, Apple's walled garden looks like a choice, not a necessity.
- Apple heads into the January 15 Macworld keynote with its music pricing and format strategy under visible pressure from every major label at once.
Third-order effects
- If all four majors abandon copy protection, DRM stops being a condition of digital music sales and competition shifts to storefront convenience, price, and device ecosystems — a structural defeat for the format-lock model the industry spent most of the decade defending.
The trend: The major-label system is dismantling DRM as the default term of digital music sales, moving competitive power from copy protection toward whoever controls distribution and playback devices.