He's right. I love eMusic, but it's got nothing to do with DRM. It's because I get 90 songs (or about 8-9 albums) a month for $19.99. All I want is music that will play on my iPod and stereo. I could care less if there's DRM.

It's not a purely apples (eMusic)-to-apples (iTunes, et al) comparison (no pun intended). eMusic doesn't offer recordings from the major labels. If eMusic did, maybe the number of downloads per major-label track would be much higher than the current eMusic average because of the greater popularity of major-label tracks.

As for any indie artists contemplating whether to make their tracks available with ot without DRM, isn't it widely accepted that they'll make their money by drawing fans to their performances and not by selling their recordings? Of course, their labels (major or indie) would see things differently.

could somebody explain the anacronym please?

DRM = Digital Rights Management = restrictions on what you can do with the music you bought

Don't let the 'R' in DRM fool you officially it stands for 'rights', but in most cases 'restriction' or another synonym is a better description. DRM not only restricts what you can do with you music (copy, burn to CD's, share), it also restricts how and where you play it (ipod, zune, windows, mac, linux).

For instance, I am a linux user and emusic is best for me since there is a opensource download client I can use to download music from their site and most importantly no DRM! Music bought from Apple, Microsoft and others won't play on linux. Not to mention music bought with iTunes must be played in an iPod or in iTunes and I believe the Zune is the same way.

I suppose that is/was the beauty of CD's you don't have to have a special player to listen to them. All CD players are the same, and played standard media. Now companies is trying to lock listeners into their service and player.

But as the above article points out, Linux users are a microscopic segment of music listeners. Artists and labels who believe in DRM have almost nothing to gain by abandoning that position just to sell downloads to Linux users.

Oh I agree linux users are a very small segment and I do not expect labels and media companies to bend to our whim, I also agree they have no reason to change. My point is only that non-DRM music gives the consumer choices of devices, software and medium. I simply used linux as an example of a relatively "obscure" way to play music to show that DRM-free music works regardless of what you use to play it on.

a response:

http://www.dbspin.com/archives/169

I wrote a short response last night which hits on what dbspin.com is talking about in #6, "a service rather than a product".

http://www.musicsucks.net/2006/12/18/economics-of-the-mp3/