Male_M3dia posted at 11:57AM Tue, 02 February 2016 - #4252746

Actually it did help sales, since the convenience of having access to not only your library but the store in the palm of your hand made it not worth looking online for sites to illegally download songs and made smart phones so popular. Certainly help close the majority of music store chains, except for a few specialty ones that had import sections. And it did increase revenue enough so that Apple could get the music industry to remove DRM from those files.. though they did charge you 30 cents more for the privilege. The explosion of the iphone and other smart devices helped lower piracy over when DRM was instituted over the backlash of the music industry from the napster days.

The music industry was probably a special case, since they were dragged, kicking and screaming, into the download business. At the time of Napster I don't recall there being any legal way to download MP3's - The music industry was fighting it because the record labels didn't want to lose control of their distribution channels. They were still only interested in selling physical CD's.they didn't care if it was from a brick and mortar store or an online one - but it had to be a CD. The only early exception I can find was Ritmoteca.com which was primarily Latin music. Napster of course brought things to a head simply because at the time they were the all-time-king copyright violator. They also knocked ritmoteca out since they didn't bother paying for their music, and ritmoteca did.

Clearly you have to throw some roadblocks in the way of people thinking they can use your intellectual property for free. Also it is clear if charge an arm and a leg for it, they'll find a way around it.

I imagine Apple was successful at getting the DRM removed (and the price lowered) at least in part because independent labels and bands managed to break the stranglehold the big labels had on the recording industry.

I still have to say that making customers who are already paying you for your product inconvenienced in using it is a sure way to lose sales. I'm not saying DAZ is doing that, I think a lot of the reaction is over "what if" rather than "what is"