Not if Apple as anything to do with it. But the DRM that has prevented users from using music purchased from iTunes on a Windows mp3 player, and vice versa, is starting to feel a real backlash from consumers. It’s about time!

CDs once used to be able to be played in any CD player. But as consumers have recently discovered, not only have the latest ‘copy-proof’ CDs failed to play in some car CD players and some computer systems, companies like Sony have been actively invading our computers with rootkits to prevent us from ever using our CDs in the way that was intended – so we can listen to music on any CD playing music device that we own.

Companies such as eMusic and Amie have been selling mp3s from independent artists without any form of DRM for some time, and have seen consistently growing sales, showing the major music companies that DRM-free music is a money maker.

This comes at an important time – when sales of DRM music from a range of online stores, including iTunes, is growing, but is still far eclipsed by the number of physical CDs sold every year.

When Yahoo sold one of Jessica Simpson’s tracks last year without DRM, not only did it show the potentially questionable taste of some of its users, but it showed the track to be enormously popular, with the public effectively giving the DRM-free music experiment a very big thumbs up.

Even Bill Gates said words to the effect that purchasing digital music is best done on CD, so it could be easy transferred to different music devices in the home. And he sells DRM software and the Zune!

Music companies, do you want to make big profits? Sell your tracks at US 50c each, or even cheaper, and don’t use DRM – just use the standard mp3 format. Not only will music be so cheap to purchase legally, quickly and free of viruses or malware, that only die-hard pirates will bother to download music without paying.

Make it cheap enough that anyone can afford it, and you’ll have 10 times the number of buyers, tomorrow. You’ll also be able to create your own stores that can sell music that works on an iPod – without Apple getting involved.

Of course, the music companies want to INCREASE prices. But that kind of insanity only fuels piracy, and gives consumers a pirate, DRM-free format that’s actually more useful than legally purchased DRM content.

And naturally, the same goes for the TV show and movie companies. If only they could have figured this all out at the start – the industry would be far more advanced than it is today.

Now that the potential for DRM-free content is really start to catch the eye of the executives and the beancounters of the major music and movie companies, there’s hope that we might one day live in a DRM-free world after all.
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