Music Execs Confuse "Choice" With Making You Pay Over And Over Again

JeffVCheesedOff writes in with a link to a BBC story where they ask a bunch of recording industry execs questions about the digital music market and file sharing. The answers are exactly what you'd expect, with all the typical "it's just wrong" and "no musicians would ever make money" quotes that you've come to expect -- despite the fact that they're simply not true. However, Jeff pointed out one particular quote, concerning copy protection technology that he found particularly upsetting for a good reason. John Kennedy from the IFPI (the international version of the RIAA) is quoted as saying: "Without DRM, the explosion in the availability of music via digital channels would not have been possible. The purpose of DRM is not to alienate music fans, it is actually to improve your access to music. There are now at least 10 ways in which you can legally enjoy music - the list includes: ringtone, master ringtone, phone download, phone stream, a-la-carte download, disc, subscription, online stream, UMD music for PlayStation, kiosk and video. Without DRM, these options simply wouldn't be possible."

That is, of course, flat out wrong. You could do pretty much all of those things without any form of content protection. It would appear, however, that what Kennedy really means is that these new options are simply more ways for the industry to get you to pay again for what you already paid for. To make this even more amusing, another questions asks about why people should be forced to buy the same song multiple times... and he blames the tech industry: "I agree with you we'd like nothing more than for you to be able to download or transfer music securely between your phone, your home and work PC, a couple of your players and your home Hi-Fi system, for example. But we don't make the technology, we create the music. It's the technology companies that hold the key to achieving this." Of course, maybe if he didn't insist on putting copy protection on everything, then it would work just fine.