EMI Not as Eager for DRM-free Music

I am admittedly a pessimist. I don’t even hide it. On a good day, I’d more charitably describe myself as a skeptic. Trust me, though, that I often wish I was wrong. My gut was telling me that there was more to the chatter over any of the majors offering any or all of their catalogs free of DRM.

And I was right, EMI apparently wants a prohibitive advance before it will consider doing so. I put this in the same category as Jobs’ letter on DRM, that it is immensely disingenuous. Poor little EMI, they really would give the consumers what they want if only it didn’t cost so much. Boohoo. “Just help us defray the ‘legitimate’ cost of doing the right thing and we’ll happily forego DRM.”

I call shenanigans. The only thing that will make them seriously consider dropping DRM is if they saw the benefit outweighing any implicit costs, like re-encoding or whatever. At that point they’d pay any price because the ROI would be too blatant to ignore. I expect that shy of that particular circumstance, any muttering on their part about dropping DRM in any way is simply lip service.

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