Who would have known that that the death of DRM would come in the form of a press release? While MP3 stores are nothing new, with iTunes moving to a 100% DRM free catalog by the 31st of March this now cements a de facto standard of DRM free music in the marketplace. As a side effect it's now a near certainty that AAC will become the successor of MP3.
posted by Talez on Jan 6, 2009 - 135 comments

So you've decided that you're uneasy with Apple's virtual monopoly on digital music. So you picked Microsoft's Zune. Hell, maybe you even got a tattoo! You're bucking the trend, and you're satisfied with your purchase. It's not like Microsoft would make a faulty machine, would they? Well...Happy New Year!
posted by yellowbinder on Dec 31, 2008 - 194 comments

"'49:00' is a 43-minute-long album in the form of one long recorded track that claims to be six minutes longer, and insists in its subtitle on grabbing exactly that portion of your time/life." To commemorate his upcoming 49th birthday, ex-Replacement Paul Westerberg released his first digital album on 'June 49th.' He's worked out an exclusive arrangement with Amazon, selling it at a price that's all shook down: $0.49.
posted by scarylarry on Aug 1, 2008 - 21 comments

Coming off the previously-addressed possibility of Apple purchasing Vivendi Music comes the news (if you still call the New York Post that) that Microsoft might want the company too. Are people, especially the online community, going to make this out as a battle between good and evil? Or is Bill Gates' Dance Party a good thing?
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Apr 15, 2003 - 15 comments

You too can be a felon! Last year, the SDMI Foundation made a public challenge to see if anyone could crack 6 proposed protection mechanisms for digitally-encoded music. All six turned out to be feeble and all six fell. Since then, the SDMI Foundation has been relying on lawyers to cover up for the incompetence of their engineers. They're trying to suppress this article, so everyone reading this has a duty to make and store a copy of it. (Everyone should also own at least one copy of DeCSS. I have the 442-character C version printed on the back of my personal card.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Apr 21, 2001 - 15 comments

A while back, you'll remember, a professor from Princeton cracked the SDMI watermark, but couldn't publish [MeFi search], and weren't awarded the prize because they wouldn't NDA. Well, a French team has also cracked it, and not being bound by the US DMCA, they've published. Good thing? Or bad?
posted by baylink on Jan 23, 2001 - 3 comments

IBM, with the latest attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. Their fatal flaw is betting on a post-napster world, though I bet their EMMS technology gets cracked before that ever happens.
posted by mathowie on Jan 22, 2001 - 11 comments

The SDMI Hack challenge seems to have gone down in flames. And apparently it wasn't even very difficult to break into it. This article goes into it in some detail. [more]
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 17, 2000 - 5 comments