Archive for: drm
As an anti-piracy tool DRM simply doesn’t work – and it never will, although not everyone fully realizes this. For example, Ubisoft recently decided to introduce a new solution to prevent pirates from playing their games. Their new DRM requires gamers to be online all the time when playing the game. Without an Internet connection the game simply won’t work.
The new plans were welcomed with skepticism by fellow game developers and the majority of gamers. Instead of hindering piracy the DRM only restricts legitimate customers from playing the game how and where they want, most people agreed.
A survey among members of the Subsim community regarding the DRM on Silent Hunter 5 shows that, if anything, the new DRM is putting off customers from actually buying the game. Only 15% of the respondents said that the DRM wouldn’t affect their plans to buy Silent Hunter 5, while 85% said they would delay or cancel their purchase until a DRM-free version becomes available.
From these responses it could be concluded that many potential customers would prefer to use a DRM-free (pirated) copy instead of the legitimate product, which is the opposite of what Ubisoft wanted to accomplish.
Silent Hunter 5 was released on Tuesday and just a few hours later a cracked version of the game was published on many file-sharing sites. Ubisoft, worrying that DRM-haters would download the game illegally, quickly responded to the news about the cracked DRM and released a statement in which they downplay ‘the issue’.
“You have probably seen rumors on the web that Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 have been cracked. Please know that this rumor is false and while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete,” Ubisoft quickly responded.
While many downloaders report that the game works just fine, Ubisoft’s statement does hold some truth because in their view the game is obviously ‘not complete’ without the DRM. At this point it is not entirely clear what else could be “missing” in the cracked version, but that is beside the point.
The bottom line is that their revolutionary DRM invention was cracked in a matter of hours, and although the crack might not be perfect yet, it will be eventually. The end result will be that the pirated version of the game will be more appealing and less restrictive than the actual retail product. Thus, the DRM is encouraging and increasing piracy instead of putting a halt to it.
It looks like Ubisoft has made a massive mistake with their strong focus on DRM. In fact, the time and effort spent on fine-tuning the DRM would have been better spent on game development, so that they didn’t have to release a patch with bugfixes a day after the game was released.
Let’s hope Ubisoft quickly comes to its senses and releases another patch that removes the needless DRM from the game.
Amazon has just launched their Mp3 Music store in the UK. The store can be found at http://mp3.amazon.co.uk. The simple-to-use digital music store offering over 3 million DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) songs which will work on any MP3 player including the iPod™- with top-selling albums from just £3 and individual songs from 59p.
Amazon Mp3 UK has all four major labels signed up, SonyBMG, Universal Music, EMI Music and Warner Music – and leading independents such as Cooking Vinyl, Harmonia Mundi, Beggars Banquet, The Orchard, Concord and IODA.
Greg Greeley, Vice-President of Amazon EU Retail said: “We’re excited to provide our UK customers with more ways to discover and enjoy great music. In addition to the millions of low-priced CDs available in our music store, Amazon MP3 now provides a vast selection of DRM-free albums and songs across every genre you can think of, ready to enjoy in seconds”.
GroovesharkLite is a self-contained flash based application which lets you search, listen and purchase mp3’s online. It has a library of over 6 Million songs covering everything from tiny Indies to all the Majors.
It’s a peer to peer music service in the same vein as Limewire, which also allows users to stream and purchase songs.
Users are not required to register or login to their account in order to search and play songs. You are only required to login to your account when you want to purchase a particular mp3. Otherwise you are free listen to songs as much as you want.
You can also get free mp3’s with GroovesharkLite, for example if someone purchases a song that you seed, you would receive a credit that can be used to purchase more songs from the network.
Check it out: http://listen.grooveshark.com
Crenk has long been a part of the Insomnia Media Group, which today is launching our music initiative.
RouteNote is a user driven music distribution service, allowing indie artists to get access to major online retailers and make their music available to film, radio and other media producers for quick, easy licensing.
The site is launching into public beta which involves our distribution section. Distribution through RouteNote will allow unsigned artists and independent labels from all over the world to sell their music in some of the worlds largest online stores. RouteNote is a completely non-exclusive music distributor that has some of the best rates in the industry. Artists are able to sign up for FREE, uploading as many tracks as they would like and being able to keep 90% of the revenues from download sales.
What RouteNote offers:
- Retain 100% Ownership of your tracks
- Non-exclusive
- Worldwide Exposure
- No Signup Fees
- Receive 90% from all download sales
- It wont stop you from signing up to a record label in the future
- Forward looking partnerships and marketing expertise
RouteNote is a unique service that can help hundreds of thousands of artists all over the world. So why not signup today.
Stay tuned for more features to also launch over time.
Here at Crenk we have already reported about Myspace and their new music offering several times. It seems now that the launch is imminent. The LA Times has reported that Myspace will be launching their music offering as early as tomorrow. The new service will compete directly with iTunes and will be offering music downloads, streams, videos and mobile phone ring tones, along with related items, such as merchandise and concert tickets.
Stay tuned for more coverage about the launch in coming days.
There has been a lot in the last few days about the announcement by Last.fm about there new business model. Their business model has moved from 30 second clips of songs to full length streams. This however has a restriction of only 3 streams per song per artist. This is a major negative point with the new business model, because once you really get into a song I know I tend to play mine 10 times a day. All these announcements came on the back end of Last.fm signing content agreements will all four major labels.
Artists will be monetized by these streams through the advertising revenue made by the site. I know for a long time Imeem has been attempting to do exactly the same business model and they have had a great deal of success with this. Imeem now has all four major labels signed up and they are making a great deal of money off of the advertising model. Last.fm has also announced that their new revenue model is not exclusive to only the major labels, and anyone on Last.fm can now opt-in and stream their full music for very low royalties.
This all being said I would have really like to see Last.fm slightly change their model. I dont see why there is a limit on the amount of streams per song, unless they have an additional model that allows members to sign up at an additional fee to be able to play the song unlimited times. It is also good to see that Last.fm has partnered with 7digital to offer the music downloads, however a long term solution for Last.fm must be to kill this partnership and enter the download market independently, this might even be a threat to iTunes!
I am still not convinved by Last.fm. The have a great piece of technology in the scrobbler, but I dont think their professionalism on that software has carried over to the site, monetization options and also profile and social network strategy.
I made my prections for 2008 about 2 weeks ago and already Napster seems to have listened to me and they are now more open to DRM free solutions. Napster just announced that they will be abandoning DRM completely in its music download store in the second quarter of this year. Napster will still however apply copyright protection to its subscription service, but when a user purchases an a la carte download the files will no longer be in DRM WMA format, but in Mp3 format.
This is a very positive move for Napster because they are currently in approximately 5th in download store ratings, behind iTunes, eMusic, Amazon and Rhapsody. This move and forward thinking is slowly getting pushed upon online download stores from the major record labels, and it is very refreshing to see Napster is trying to improve their position in the market and jumping on board the DRM free before some of the others.
