Holy crap. I had saw all the news about Yahoo! selling a single DRM-free mp3 of a crappy Jessica Simpson song. My first reaction was: “Great! DRM-free is the way to go! I hope Yahoo! doesn’t kill eMusic”
Well, I didn’t actually look at the page that sells the song, and missed two crucial points. Here they are:
1. You have to choose your “name” to be burned into the song. One article I read called it “mashed-up into the song”. I say “digital signature and tracking’ed up into the song”. (NB: The article does mention that 2 people downloaded the same song and compared them, and they were byte-for-byte identical. For these 2 guys. For this 1 case.)
2. Its $1.99. Yes! TWO DOLLARS! For one song! Holy Bejeezus! eMusic.com costs $19.95/month, and I get 90 songs. Thats about 22 cents per song. Yahoo is charging almost TEN TIMES more! (for worse music!)
If this is Yahoo!’s vision of DRM-free music, then I don’t want any. Thank you very much. Long live eMusic!