4 ms·

Especially in large corporations where each level of the hierarchy lives in a bubble of sort, meaning that the people OP interacted might have actually believed

Especially in large corporations where each level of the hierarchy lives in a bubble of sort, meaning that the people OP interacted might have actually believed it was to prevent piracy while the people in that corp some level above them had a different motive to getting DRM pushed.

kingcharles 5y ago
We, as a company, interacted with people at every level of these labels. We had regular meetings all the way to the top. For the most part though, the staff were universally non-technical. They loved music, knew music, but their technical infrastructure was fairly limited. We had to rip CDs (250,000 of them) like everyone else because they didn't have any of their data in any easily accessible form. There was never any hint of any conspiracy or any other motivation than to limit piracy. They saw that DRM files could not be traded on Napster or any other file-sharing system du jour and that was all they wanted. Sales be damned.
- shmerl 5y ago
  I guess sometimes lack of common sense is indeed the reason. But I suspect that's not the most widespread case. Here is an interesting related story: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Thanks. Sounds like the same resistance we met. I'll be honest, we didn't fight hard enough to get rid of the DRM. We had to fight really, really hard just to let the labels put the music online at all. They didn't want to cut into their CD sales and they thought CDs were forever. The only way we got meetings was by taking a celebrity musician with us (Peter Gabriel) who could open the door to any label. Once we'd opened the door to each label, Apple would breeze in right behind us and find no resistance. Later they used the Cult of Jobs as their leverage to get rid of DRM on their downloads. It looks like DRM is creeping back in again to their lossless and Atmos downloads now Jobs is no longer around to use his muscle to keep the labels honest. It's like an addiction for them, they can't stay away from it.

kingcharles 5y ago

We, as a company, interacted with people at every level of these labels. We had regular meetings all the way to the top. For the most part though, the staff were universally non-technical. They loved music, knew music, but their technical infrastructure was fairly limited. We had to rip CDs (250,000 of them) like everyone else because they didn't have any of their data in any easily accessible form. There was never any hint of any conspiracy or any other motivation than to limit piracy. They saw that DRM files could not be traded on Napster or any other file-sharing system du jour and that was all they wanted. Sales be damned.

shmerl 5y ago
I guess sometimes lack of common sense is indeed the reason. But I suspect that's not the most widespread case. Here is an interesting related story: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Thanks. Sounds like the same resistance we met. I'll be honest, we didn't fight hard enough to get rid of the DRM. We had to fight really, really hard just to let the labels put the music online at all. They didn't want to cut into their CD sales and they thought CDs were forever. The only way we got meetings was by taking a celebrity musician with us (Peter Gabriel) who could open the door to any label. Once we'd opened the door to each label, Apple would breeze in right behind us and find no resistance. Later they used the Cult of Jobs as their leverage to get rid of DRM on their downloads. It looks like DRM is creeping back in again to their lossless and Atmos downloads now Jobs is no longer around to use his muscle to keep the labels honest. It's like an addiction for them, they can't stay away from it.