[jobs] Lead Salesperson/Marketer at Southern Records; Chicago, IL. More music jobs.

July 19, 2006

Lost in the discussion about Jessican Simpson's customized download (mentioned yesterday at Coolfer) is the fact that the file comes in MP3 format. For $2 the buyer gets a song with his/her name in the lyrics and gets freedoms not available with any other major label download. From a post at the Yahoo! Music Blog:

"Dear digital consumer, even if you’re not into Jessica Simpson, and you’re not excited about spending $2 for a song, let me tell you, this is a bigger deal than you might think. As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform."

The majors' embrace of the MP3 has been incremental. The slow pace of change frustrates many, but the majors were never going to ditch DRM and run to MP3 en masse. They're taking it one day at a time. If Sony BMG is comfortable with the Simpson experiment, more should be on the way.

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Posted by Glenn at 5:23 PM | | | DRM | Digital Music