Seattle Subsonic

R.I.P. DRM

August 17th, 2008

That’s Digital Rights Management.
As a refresher, DRM is coding built into media files that limits the number of users that can access/play that file. Sometimes, as in the case of iTunes music store, a song I buy can be played on up to four other devices that I “authorize”. For instance, I have three Macs, an iPod and now an iPhone. I can’t send you an iTunes Music Store purchase with my iTunes password, as my devices use up my 5 licenses. Bummer, right? Apple and others set this up their music stores like this so they’d play nice with the captains of the music industry.

But what if you could play music in your friend’s iTunes library without ever having to take possession of those MP3/AAC files? Uh oh. DRM doesn’t mean jack all of the sudden.

I found an app this week that allows me to stream the music library of up to 30 other users to my computer or phone, and I immediately began to think of how irrelevant DRM had become. I’ll spare the sales pitch of this program, but it works in the same way as opening your notebook in a coffee shop and seeing the shared libraries of other people in the room. Except now, those shared libraries belong to up to 30 of your friends, and they don’t even have to be in the same time zone as you. And I can play songs from those libraries whether I am on my Mac at home or using my iPhone. Yeah, suddenly battling for a 16GB iPhone over an 8GB model doesn’t seem to mean jack, either. Having potentially 30 other libraries from which to stream tunes, in addition to the power of services like Last.fm and Pandora, makes a pretty strong case for the music industry to declare DRM dead.