[Gerard]

With the bulk of the music industry finally waking up this week and killing DRM plans, it seems rather obvious that their collective heads are being withdrawn from the sand. Finally, Apple and others are recognising that hurting their customers by limiting or even in some cases preventing their use of legitimately purchased music is not really a good business practice. Those who would steal will still steal. DRM of all types has proven long since to be 'crackable' and in fact the very presence of DRM locks has been inspiring to crackerz, who most often unlock such media simply for the pleasure of beating those who put the locks in place. Take away the DRM, remove one tasty bit of temptation. Of course theft/distribution of music will continue either way, but without the draconian and ill-fated DRM tools in place the materials in question become a bit less interesting to a segment of kiddiez who spend day and night looking for ways to waste their time, while hurting the corporate world. It's not about hurting musicians... well, mostly not. I mean there are some musicians who act like corporations, and spreading free versions of the 'music' of those 'artists' would seem a laudable goal in itself, you know, just to be annoying. No motivation in terms of listening, I mean...

Times are changing. The popularity of computer use to access more and more types of information over using other technologies, such as the radio, is constantly rising in all parts of the world. If the music industry does not keep up, there will simply be no music industry left. The mega-distributors are likely doomed anyway, but their resistance to change through things like DRM accelerates their demise. Giving customers what they want has usually been a good business model, and it's hard to imagine why music supply should be any different.