An interview with Bob Kohn (co-founder of eMusic and the man who wrote the book on music licensing) in Forbes gets to the core of what Kohn thinks of DRM and the digital music market, "When the majors told us in my eMusic days that they wouldn't sell their recordings in MP3 format, I would say, 'You already are--you're selling CDs, and you can turn them into MP3 files.' If they [drop DRM] today, you will see a tremendous increase in digital download sales, because then you will finally see some good competition to iTunes."eMusic's popularity has done a great deal for the credibility of the mp3 as a distribution format, and Amazon's new entry should do still more but we've still got a long way to go. It's encouraging to see Mp3 positive language in a publication like Forbes but, we need a full court press on the labels to make 2007 the year of the Mp3. Music fans and musicians need to step up and demand that the majors give us music in the format we want.
1. I hate to admit this but I don't have the contact info for any of the execs at the recording labels. If I did I would have told them about wanting MP3s a long time ago.
Posted at 5:09PM on Dec 29th 2006 by D