WastedTimes

[aiolos]

I'd say this is a very good move. The price is a bit high, but it's a very good start. Hope others follow...


Yahoo announced Wednesday that it is selling Jessica Simpson's latest single in MP3 format--in other words, with none of the usual copyright protection coding.

Because the song, a party-pop track called "A Public Affair," has no digital rights management (DRM) protection coded into it, it will be compatible with just about every type of digital music player, from the iPod to the iRiver, as well as with film- and music-editing programs that may not have been able to read DRM-encoded files.

"We've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now," writes Yahoo Music blogger Ian Rogers. "DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc., instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway."

The Recording Industry Association of America, a music industry trade group, declined to comment on Yahoo's preference for selling MP3 music files.