Another Hit On The Music Mafia

Well, less than ten days after Amazon's mp3 store debut, an executive at Yahoo! Music is declaring war on DRM (in case you forgot, that's digital rights management, a nice way of saying "strangling restrictions").

In fact, he's taking a stand many of us had hoped Apple's Steve Jobs was about to take when he made his famous "Open Letter To The Music Industry" last year. Unfortunately, business as usual continued at Jobs' house. But Ian Rogers at Yahoo! is making a stand for convenience and consumer friendliness. Here's an excerpt from a speech he gave last week, the transcript of which is now posted on his blog, complete with the slides he used:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

Very well said, Ian. I highly recommend reading the entire post by clicking here. It's good to see that there are still some people with vision in places of power and influence. I really do pray that their vision will succeed and bring us a bright future where the ability to listen to, discover new, and above all else, LOVE music will be greater than at any time in history.

YAHOO!
(thanks to gizmodo for featuring this story)