By 2001, online music “sharing” was costing the major record companies billions of dollars a year in lost revenues. Not surprisingly, they embarked on a two-pronged solution to the problem. Through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), they brought the full force of the legal system to bear. They succeeded in shutting down the original Napster file-sharing “company”, then weighed in on individual “sharers”, as well as file sharing “ecosystems” like the networks connecting college dormitory rooms. That part of the battle is on going – a new round of legal action began this week.

The second part of the recording industry’s solution is the online music store. The concept seems simple enough. Pay your money, download a song or album, and use it as you wish (as you would a CD from a “real” store). Problem is, how do you keep someone from downloading a song, and “sharing” it with the world, just as was done with CDs?

The first attempts at selling music online were more like renting. You paid a subscription fee, and could listen to all the music in the music store catalog. You could either listen to a “streamed” version (which was “perishable”), or actually download the song onto your computer. However, if your subscription ran out, the songs you downloaded onto your computer were rendered useless. For an additional fee, you could burn the song onto a CD. However, once the song was burned onto a CD, it could always be re-imported onto the computer to be “shared” again (albeit at a lesser quality, due to the compression and decompression process). With the advent of the personal digital music player, a system was needed to protect the rights of the recording industry and the artist, as well as the ability of the consumer to play the music across all mediums. The result? Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

Simplistically, DRM is designed to allow only the purchaser of digital music to use the original version they purchased for their own “fair use”. For example, if you purchase a song (or songs) from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, you can: store (and listen to) the song on up to three personal computers at a time (which is tranferrable); store the song on an unlimited number of iPod personal music players; and, with some restrictions on the number of similar “playlists” to prevent mass-copying, burn the song onto as many CDs as you wish. There is still nothing stopping you from burning a purchased song onto a CD, then importing it back onto a computer. Perhaps the time, resources, and reduction in quality involved in such a process makes it a low priority for DRM protection.

How does the computer know it’s playing a song it “owns”? When you purchase and download a song, that digital file is “encoded” with an ID and password you establish when supplying your credit card data. When you play that song on your computer the first time, the digital file “registers” that computer, authorizing it to play the song. Should you try to play it on an unregistered computer, the song will “ask” again for the ID and password. No ID/password? No play. It sounds complicated, but in practice, it’s transparent to the user.

With DRM systems in place, online music stores are popping up weekly, it seems. The industry-leading Apple’s iTunes Music Store, Napster 2.0, BuyMusic.com, CokeMusic.com, Sony - even WalMart is getting in on the action. Who will prevail? That issue may be decided not by price and selection, but by the very format the music is encoded in. Well talk about media formats next time.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski