Yahoo quietly broke a critical sound barrier by selling pop princess Jessica Simpson’s latest single in MP3 format without the digital rights management software that major record labels have long said is necessary to prevent piracy.
The track called A Public Affair will be compatible with all digital music players, including Apple’s iconic iPod and others manufactured by Creative, iRiver, and Samsung.
A Public AffairYahoo Music has been publicly lobbying the music industry for quite some time to sell MP3s without copyright protection, arguing that DRM software is very expensive for Internet retailers to implement.
“DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label, or consumer; the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform,” Ian Rogers, director of product management at Yahoo Music, wrote Wednesday in a Yahoo blog.
Consumer Confusion
Critics also complain that selling music with copyright protection software confuses consumers because DRM software determines which devices can play the tracks. For example, all other songs sold on Yahoo Music are encoded with Microsoft DRM and will not play on Apple’s iPod.
A Public Affair was released by Epic, a label owned by SonyBMG, one of the world’s largest music companies. Those companies weren’t available for comment late Thursday.
MP3 tracks have for years been frowned upon by major record labels such as EMI and Warner Music because MP3 can be easily copied and illegally shared over peer-to-peer file-sharing services.
As a result of the widespread music piracy on P2P services such as Grokster and BitTorrent, major record labels have been extremely reluctant to sell digital music tracks unless encoded by copyright protection software.
Online music stores such as Apple’s iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody all sell non-MP3 tracks that are wrapped in DRM software. One notable exception is eMusic, a subscription service that sells MP3s primarily from small independent labels.
Yahoo Music said it was selling the Simpson MP3 for $1.99, twice as much as the industry standard $0.99 download, because it can be personalized to include the buyer’s name in the track.
Contact the writers:SMorrison@RedHerring.com and AWeinstein@RedHerring.com