Sony Ericsson's Music Store is 'Coming 2008' As Well
Published by Ewan Spence at 12:02 UTC, January 28th 2008
As Amazon announce plans to expand their music store, StrategyEye points towards Sony Ericsson’s similar plans for a music store. Details are limited, so there’s no word on what file format will be employed (and ergo what form, if any, of DRM will be used), nor on what countries will receive the service ‘by the end of 2008.’
As with Amazon, the press release is geared more towards the Stock Market and keeping them legally informed of upcoming plans than making a PR splash, hence the lack of details, but it again shows that handset manufacturers are looking to bolster revenue, either directly through extra-value services, or increased handset sales because of the attractiveness of the third party services.
I’m also intrigued to see if the general public actually cares about DRM – iTunes music is DRM’med to the iPod range, while Nokia’s Music Store has Windows Media protection. If it works with their handsets, will the regular shopper actually care enough to be swayed by a bullet point marked ‘DRM free’ as opposed to ‘access to 3/4/5 million tracks’ or ‘unlimited music track downloads?’
What do you think?
Categories: Links of Interest
Platforms: UIQ 3
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My personal experience based on what I've seen among the people I know or work with (even among those reasonably computer savvy) is that many people don't care about DRMs simply because they don't really understand the implications of tying themselves to a specific DRM system and are not willing to waste time trying to understand what the heck this is all about (the term "DRM" itself is probably Chinese to most people).
They then later realize they're mistake whenever they upgrade their software, buy a new computer or mobile device and realize that their music won't play anymore or won't play on their new toy. But there again, many people have become so used to the "it just doesn't work" (how many people find it perfectly normal to have to restart their PC every so often just to keep it working properly?) that they don't really care either. They'll just ask their geek friend to "fix the problem" or just give up trying to get their music back but still keep buying DRMed stuff nonetheless.
There is something that many techno geeks / journalists don't seem to get (but marketing people have gotten this a long time ago): "normal" (or opposed to geek) people still treat computers and Internet as a somewhat mysterious black box and have no interest whatsoever in decrypting tech language. They just want things to be simple and as long as they appear to be simple, they won't try to find what the catch is.
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