Yahoo Exec: “DRM is a Consumer Cost”

In a rarely heard of speech at the Music 2.0 conference, Yahoo exec Dave Goldberg floored the audience by pushing back on the record labels.

DRM is not a consumer value proposition, it’s a consumer cost. It creates a nice barrier of entry for the tech companies, rather than something that’s beneficial to labels, artists, or consumers

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the mechanism where the record labels maintain a stranglehold on one of the last media outlets not completely digitized. Though the music industry has moved to digital models in many ways, the giants in the industry continue to hold back trying to hold onto an industry that is slipping through their fingers.

I like how Ian Rogers words it on the Yahoo Music blog:

What Dave is really asking the labels to do is to experiment along with us to grow legal music services as a category. Legal services are a very small percentage of the downloading activity on the Web, yet studies tell us people *are* willing to pay for high-value content and services. The larger subtext of the “No DRM” message that got headlines is: help us build great legal services for users, don’t hold us back.