Music labels losing sales over DRM
From the article Music labels losing sales over DRM
(...) the E-Commerce Times piece is anecdotal, their conclusions are borne out in the recent “rootkit” debacle that Hesse insisted did not matter to people. A Businessweek article suggests otherwise, documenting how Van Zant’s Get Right with the Man fell in Amazon’s rankings from 887 to 1392 to 25,802 to “unavailable” in less than three weeks after the rootkit was revealed. Consumers are waking up, and they don’t like what they see.
The most interesting thing about the DRM war currently underway is that it might not even need to be fought. The industry’s tactics are not designed to restrict commerical piracy, but file-swapping. However, a 2004 Harvard/UNC study found that the music industry’s Chicken Little claims of apocalyptic destruction were, ahem, overstated. From the abstract:
“Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”