Tag: wmg
Old & Broken: Paying to have them tell you what you can do with your music
by schwim on Jun.01, 2008, under MPAA & RIAA, Music
New Hotness: Paying to not have any rights to the song at all.
Werner Music Group is in a pickle. They want you to start buying their music again but they also think that DRM isn’t quite restrictive enough. Sure, they already tell you what players you can listen to your music on, they tell you how many times you can listen to it and on how many different devices. They even have the ability to take away those rights at any time with a simple shutting down of a DRM server when they don’t feel like honoring the license agreement any more.
As I’m sure you’d agree, WMG feels that you have too much freedom with your purchased music. To help curtail the rampant piracy allowed by previous draconian measures, they’ve come up with LaLa. What is LaLa? It’s simple. With LaLa, you can pay ten cents per song. You then get absolutely nothing.
Seriously. You pay them ten cents and they will allow you to listen to the song from a browser tab on their site. Much like you listen to a song on M-TV or the radio, only that’s free. This allows you to pay for that privilege. You do feel privileged, don’t you?
While Michael Roberts is more diplomatic than I am about the whole affair, he doubts it will fly.
Imagine that.
