Male_M3dia posted at 10:23AM Tue, 02 February 2016 - #4252722

Actually drm didn't get dropped in music because of low sales. Piracy was less of an issue because the mechanism to get music was far easier to get on your device from the iTunes stores for $1 than scour websites for music that could potentially put viruses on your computer. This is true especially when you don't even have to go on the computer to get music, you just search on the device itself and you have the file in about 2 minutes. Video files are still encrypted from the store because the same hasn't occurred due to the size of video and the price of files can still be more expensive than finding a site to download them.

It certainly didn't get them more sales which is the point of the whole thing. The problem is this: When you're dealing with physical items, theft costs you every time. If someone shoplifts a DVD from a store, the store is out the money they bought the DVD for. It doesn't matter if they could have sold the DVD to that person if they could have prevented him stealing it, it cost them money either way. The record label on the other hand still made money - they already sold their product to the store.

When you are dealing with intellectual property the situation is different. There, the only way deterring theft helps you is if you can get increased sales by making it harder to use your product without paying you since there is no incremental cost for manufacturing copies of the product. Actually the primary target is probably more casual sharing than the warez sites. Your more likely to get an extra sale from someone who is sharing files with his friends via sneaker-net, then you are from someone who is collecting a whole lot of stuff and never using it.

So from an accounting standpoint, are the increased sales from files that were once casually shared offsetting the people that no longer want your product due to your encryption or other DRM making it harder to use your product than it is worth to them?

And that is why the music industry, who were the first to employ DRM to start with, dropped it. There was no cost-benefit.