DRM
DRM and all its ramifications and iterations are a marketer’s enemy, my friends. That’s right — not only is it bad for consumers, it’s also bad for us. We all know why it’s bad for consumers — it simply takes away the rights they should have to the content they purchased and then tries to re-sell it to them. It’s ridiculous and it’s based on an old paradigm that no longer exists.
But the Evil Marketer doesn’t hate DRM because it’s unfair. I hate it because it restricts one of the most powerful word of mouth distribution systems ever created. Step back for a moment and let’s forget we’re talking about DRM. What if, my evil friends, I told you that I had devised a system to help advertise music (and other digital artistic content) that:
- Didn’t cost anything
- Was built on a platform others had supplied for free — and constantly upgraded and improved
- Encouraged users to advertise for you, but with no compensation for that referral
- Allowed for easy cross-promotion among similar artists and genres
- And finally, resulted in sales of music that were easily tracked to these referrals and cross-promotion, and didn’t cost anything in materials to get the product to the consumer
The only downside? Sometimes people would give the music away for free to people who may have otherwise purchased it. But since that’s been going on since the invention of the tape cassette and VCR, and the only difference is the scale of that potential loss, we just need to make sure it doesn’t get out of control by giving honest users an easy way to purchase at a fair price.
And that’s just the surface, folks; that’s just things as they stand now. How great will it be when we can more easily insert 5 second ads into the shared content, or add further analytics to the chain of distribution, or any number of advances that are just around the corner that will let people always have instant access to every piece of music every created, while further tying the demographics of those listeners (based on genre and all the other juicy private data we’ll be gathering) to cross promote products from other verticals?
I’d be more angry about DRM if I wasn’t so sure that its days were numbered and inexorably linked to an old guard that is slowly dying out. I just wish their deaths were quicker. The sooner they get out of the way and free up content so that we can measure and monetize it more efficiently, the better.