The Great Digital Download Con

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“Like many other Music For Grown-Ups subscribers, I have been reading for some months now about the demise of the CD and how digital downloads are replacing the shiny discs as the music format of choice.

“CD sales are down, digital downloads are up - so it must be the case that the CD is on the way out. Mind you, if you look at the actual figures, CD sales are still are in excess of downloads, and my own personal view has always been that downloads are replacing CD singles - very much the market place of "the kids". I certainly don't know anyone who is downloading whole albums and at 79p per track, you're better off picking up the album from Amazon or Play.com.

“Anyway, I recently decided to dip my toe into the legal download market, mainly because my ten year old daughter had requested some particular songs to go onto a home-made CD. I dutifully logged onto HMV's digital download service and after a couple of false starts managed to download the 5 tracks I wanted. I also downloaded one track from Tesco, a track I couldn't get from HMV (Lily Allen's smash hit "Smile" which HMV only had available to "subscibers" - strange!). Anyway, so far so good.

“It was shortly after reaching this point that I discovered "The Great Digital Download Con", also known as Digital Rights Management or DRM for short. In a nutshell, while I could quite happily listen to my downloaded tracks on my computer, I discovered that the tracks which I had purchased and which I thought now belonged to me could only be listened to on my computer. I was not able to transfer the tracks onto a CDR, or for that matter to my MP3 player.

“Now I don't know about other Music For Grown-Ups readers, but personally I don't like listening to music on my computer. I want to listen to CDs (either purchased or home-made) on my stereo system or in the car, or tracks downloaded onto my MP3 player (not an iPod, I should add). So you can imagine my annoyance when I discovered that DRM had me backed into a corner.

“Luckily, after a bit of digging around on the internet, I discovered that if I transferred the tracks into my Real Player library and then used Real Player to create the disc, I could after all create the mix CD that my daughter had requested. And once on the disc I could then rip the tracks back onto my computer and download them on to my MP3 player. However, all this seems to be hugely time consuming, especially when considering that I had paid for the downloads in the first place.

“An interesting lesson, and not one that I have the time or the inclination to repeat through choice. But it did make me wonder how much of a place digital downloads will have in the future for music listeners. I rather suspect that the humble CD, recently celebrating its 25th birthday, has plenty of life in it yet.”