Yahoo! Music seems to become a real rebel on the online-based music industry through its choice of selling MP3s without any form of copy protection, DRM. There are other online-based music stores selling music for download with copy protection, but none of these has such a large company backing them up as Yahoo! Music. In its Yahoo! Music Blog it has now posted information that reveals that it will be selling a special version of Jessica Simpson’s song, A Public Affair. The special with the song is that it is an MP3 without any copy protection and can thus be used with any kind of unit and as many times as you want.
It may sound as a given but everyone who own an iPod and use iTunes Music Store it’s obvious that downloaded music is not as free as one would want. In its official blog Yahoo! writes about its attempts to sway the record companies to sell free MP3s and even it it has had little success so far this could be an interesting test.
“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 limitations are quite obvious though, first of all there is just one song available. The price of the song is 1.99 USD, more than twice as mush as a song downloaded from Apple iTunes Music Store. But the reason for this is that you can get Jessica singing your name in the song. It is the technology behind this feature which costs. The prices of free MP3 songs are otherwise hoped to be about the same as other music stores. We sincerely hope to see more free music in the large online stores, but the question is if we will ever see the record companies letting this happen.
