My Experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management): what works & what doesn’t

In my short 30 years on the planet Earth, I have thought about DRM for only a small percentage of my time here.

That percentage of time is neatly summarized below for attention deficient disorder Internet surfers:

1996: Damn! When did CD’s start costing $18??!

1999: Hold on guys, I’ll join you all at the party once I get my huge Napster download started…

2001: Kirk: “Hmmm…so you’re saying I can buy *ANY* CD or software program for a dollar?”

Thai street vendor: “Yes! Sure! Only a dollar! They are same same but different!”

Kirk: “Wicked.”

2004: Where’d the free Napster go? They got busted?!! Oh well, I have XM radio now as well as Musicmatch.

2007: Pandora and Last.fm rock!! For the long distance driving I still have XM, and by golly, 99 cents for a song from iTunes sounds reasonable to me!

2008-Present: Currently listening to Last.fm, while I charge my iPhone loaded with free podcasts, ripped DVD’s and my entire music collection. No need for XM now that I can use my iPhone in my car. I can also stream Pandora all the time from my iPhone for free, so no need to buy much music anymore.

Ain’t life grand?

All in all, I find that the traditional model of music distribution:

artist–>record label–>store–>consumer

Has been completely subverted by cheap and easy media distribution to form a new model:

artist–>Internet–>consumer

Or perhaps even:

artist–>consumer–>artist–>consumer

These are strange times we live in, but I believe it all started when millions like myself said:

“$18 dollars for a CD with only 1-3 songs I actually want, distributed on a totally fragile medium (bare CD’s) that scratch easily?”

Cm’on!!!

-Kirk