Retailers urge music industry to ditch DRM for Christmas
Retailers are pushing the UK music industry to ditch DRM protection after new figures showed the average Briton has bought fewer than three digital tracks in the past three years.
According to the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), anti-piracy technology is “stifling growth and working against the consumer interest”, adding to the retail burden of a slow Christmas build-up in sales. Album volumes are down 11 per cent or 12m units for the year to date, while just 150m tracks have been downloaded legally in the UK over the past three years – less than one 79p per download per head of population per year.
Tentative steps have been taken – EMI is offering some titles in an enhanced MP3 format, while Universal has recently started offering its classical and jazz catalogue as MP3. But with recent research showing consumers were almost four times as likely to choose an MP3 file as a DRM-protected track (when offered alongside each other), retailers are hoping the industry taken heed of their warnings before the busy Christmas period.
Via Financial Times
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