Akeem McLennon
SONY/BMG’s Digital Paranoia
As we’re all probably aware, the record industry has been generally reluctant to sell music online. I can’t say that I can completely blame them with the onset of Napster and other file sharing services, but they’ve been making progress. When iTunes and most other music stores got started, they sold music that used Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Essentially, this was intended to prevent filesharing by limiting the number of computers it could be played on. However, unlike mp3s, DRM music files came with many annoying compatibility issues and headaches that discouraged people from buying legal downloads. Fortunately, the record companies began to realize this and started offering mp3s through sites like AmazonMp3.com.
Among the major record companies, Sony/BMG was the last to make the switch to “unprotected” music. More recently however, they seem to be notoriously hostile toward any form of streaming music. In addition to various lawsuits, I have recently noticed a condition of their recent partnership with Youtube. Most videos from Youtube can be embedded on blogs or other websites. However, this has been disabled for music videos based on songs owned by Sony/BMG. To my knowledge, none of the other major record companies do this. In fact, many artists embed Youtube videos on their own websites. Hopefully, Sony is only holding out once again like they did with mp3s, but a less people have complained about embedding videos so I’m not very optimistic about. Recently, I have also tried to get streaming licenses from them for AudioBiblio, but that has been a bit of a challenge. EMI on the other hand doesn’t have a problem with this. I’m still waiting on responses from the other two.