More DGM, Less DRM

I've been meaning to flag the fact that DGMLive has gone online. The site is the new online arm of Discipline Global Mobile, the record label founded by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and offers a growing number of Fripp and Crimson concerts and other goodies for purchase and download. This interests me as a fan, but also for other reasons: music purchased through DGMLive is available in MP3 and FLAC (lossless audio) formats, and is downloaded through the peer-to-peer filesharing software BitTorrent.

Neither of these facts sits well with standard music industry wisdom (now there's an oxymoron for you) that 1. the customer is the enemy, and cannot be trusted, 2. p2p filesharing tools of any kind are evil, and must be destroyed, and 3. because of 1. and 2., there is a need for new music formats which include strong digital rights management (DRM) measures to prevent unauthorised duplication, filesharing, or other supposedly illegal activities. At the same time, having been cheated by industry players at various times during his 40-odd-year career, Fripp can hardly be described as a friend of the music industry - which he has described repeatedly as being 'fulled by greed' -, so perhaps it's not so surprising that he would take a different approach to online distribution.

Of course it would be easy to repeat the long list of manipulations and lies committed by the recording industry and its leading organisation, the RIAA - from the fulsome statement 'copying is theft' to its rabid persecution of filesharers regardless of the consequences, to its embedding of increasingly restrictive DRM measures without alerting customers to the fact that the product they're buying is extremely limited in use. DRM and anti-filesharing measures, as well as the euphemistically named 'trusted computing' systems which are now on the horizon and enable the identification of individual computers (and their users) on the Net, are technologies in an arms race with users and independent software developers which the music industry cannot possibly win - because the very ferocity with which the RIAA is pursuing them further hardens users' anti-industry stance, but also because any form of audiovisual content which has to be played back in order to be enjoyed will necessarily always still be able to be 'pirated' at the point of playback: if I can play a CD on my speakers, then if necessary I can also record, encode, and share that sound.

What's more interesting, though, is the fact that sites such as DGMLive show us that another approach is possible, at least for some. Where the mainstream music industry has hopelessly committed itself to the punitive, sue-and-destroy approach which poisons its relations with its customers and wastes large amounts of money on DRM developments which buyers will reject, smarter labels and musicians have distanced themselves from this trainwreck in motion and have instead sought to build strong and durable bonds between artists and audients. The argument against listeners copying CDs and DVDs here is not legal and criminal, but instead a moral and ethical one: listeners who feel respected by and connected with the artists they support will continue to support them, by buying their music rather than downloading it, and by copying it only within applicable limits of fair use and for personal needs. (This, by the way, is how a good legal system should work: encourage citizens to behave lawfully not because of the threat of harsh punishment, but because they understand that doing the right thing is in the common interest.)

In November 2005, Danny Butt and I published an article on DRM and music in Australasia in a special 'creative commons and the creative industries' issue of the Media & Arts Law Review. In it, we discuss these two worldviews of how to deal with listeners that currenty exist in the music industry here and elsewhere, and we foreshadow the possibility of a deepening split between what could be called the mainstream and alternative sectors of the music industry - one hell-bent on nuking the filesharing menace through heavy-handed DRM, the other exploring new opportunities for giving listeners what they want while continuing to make a profit. DGMLive has just driven a new wedge between the two sides.

I've made available an earlier version of our paper on this site - for the final piece, please see the Media & Arts Law Review issue itself. Perhaps download some music from DGMLive while you're reading? I can highly recommend Fripp's soundscapes at the World Financial Center in New York City in November 2000, as well as the King Crimson show in Asbury Park in 1974, finally available in its original glory. And while I've said it before, followers of the machinations inside the music industry would do well to read Fripp's diary on a daily basis.