Back in February, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter discussing his thoughts on the future of downloadable music and the plague of DRM. iTunes now offers DRM some songs DRM free. Amazon upped the ante with their mp3 store. Every track they sell is DRM free. Yahoo!, it seems, is the latest to declare independence from DRM.

Ian Rodgers, a VP of Yahoo! Entertainment and general manager of Yahoo! Music, shared his thoughts on why DRM is bad for the music industry at a panel for the Digital Music Forum West. You can find the transcript of his speech along with some images on his blog. His conclusion is a call to arms for the future of digital music:

Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.

In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.

It’s a wonderful presentation and I encourage all music fans to read it in full.

Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where you can play the music that you bought on absolutely any and every device you own? Apple (to some extent), Amazon, and now Yahoo! are working to bring that dream to life. Bless them all because damn sure the music industry is too fucking stupid to do it.

Death to DRM! Long live the rocking!

[Via Fistfulayen]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 2:37 am and is filed under The Future, Tasty Jams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.