Amazon.com To Offer DRM Free Music

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 8:36 pm

Amazon.com announced today that they were going to be offering DRM free music downloads by the end of the year. Here is their press release. This is great news for you if you like owning your downloaded music.

There are already a few other sites like eMusic out there that offer DRM free music but their catalogs are limited to smaller independent labels. It is great to see a major online distributer like Amazon provide this service because there is a chance the some of the bigger labels could open up their catalogs to DRM free providers. This could put pressure on some of the other services out there like iTunes and Rhapsody to go DRM free.

If you are not familiar with the term DRM here’s a quick explanation. In a nutshell, it stands for Digital Rights Management. This technology is a way for record companies to keep you from sharing music with your friends or anyone else.

Currently if you download a song with DRM from iTunes, you can only play it on your iPod and you can only burn it 5 times. If you where to decide to remove iTunes from your computer one day, all the music, that you paid your hard earned money for, goes with it. You don’t own the music like you did with CD or cassette, fopr the most part you are just renting the music. DRM free music can be played on anything that plays mp3 and burned multiple times.

If you want a more thorough explanation of DRM, you can check out wikipedia’s breakdown of DRM.