(Damian Kulash of the band OK Go continues his guest blogging today. If you'd like to send Damian a question or comment, you can email him at his temporary guest blogger email address, damian@coolfer.com.)

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn't work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was "protected" by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.

Beyond the guaranteed functional failure, DRM is bad for everyone involved. Tech savvy fans are given more of an incentive to download illegal copies of songs off of file-sharing P2P networks. Why go to the trouble of buying the cumbersome strings-attached version of a record when you can get a better version for free? Less net-knowledgeable fans (those who don’t know how to get around DRM or don’t use P2P networks) are punished by discs that they can’t load onto their computers or iPods. They might as well have bought cassette tapes. The particularly conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, they just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them inferior versions of records, hampered by software that’s at best a pain in the ass and at worst a real threat to people’s security.

As for musicians, we get to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren’t such a hassle to listen to, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn’t sabotaged our releases. It’s pretty basic: the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. Not just in our own megalomaniacal minds, but in real numbers – the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to get stuck in someone’s head or catch the ear of somebody new. It’s basic marketing. Music advertises itself, so we want our music played as much as possible.

We don’t want people to buy our records and promptly shelve them, we want people to fall in love with them and listen to them over and over and spread our music out into the world. Any obstacle that makes a record harder to listen to is bad news for the artist that made it. A record that you can’t transfer to your iPod is a record you’re less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with, less likely to tell your friends about, and less likely to blast out of your car window as you roll down main street. Musicians (and their labels) should be making it as easy as possible for the world to listen to the records they make.

(More Damian after the jump. Please keep reading.)

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