Welcome to the race to the bottom.  Radiohead has benefited from this strategy by getting gobs of free publicity, but that benefit will decrease rapidly for subsequent artists who try the same thing.  It goes to show the challenges that any segment of the media industry has in propping up the value of content to consumers (as opposed to advertisers) when the cost of distribution nears zero.

We remember seeing Eben Moglen, then General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, on a panel at the Future of Music Coalition conference in Washington, DC, in 2002.  He said that this is how online music should be: artists should put their work up on the Internet, and users should pay whatever they think the content is worth.  The reaction from the many musical artists, songwriters, and record label people in the room -- virtually all of them "indies" -- was such that Moglen was lucky that the chairs in the auditorium were bolted down.

Similarly, at the CMJ indie music conference in New York two weeks ago, the head of a company that helps indie artists put concert recordings online talked about how musicians are happy to give away their music, they just want exposure and to sell "merch."  Again, the reaction from the actual musicians in the room was not hospitable, and another panelist dismissed the remarks as "a romantic view of the struggling artist."

What does this have to do with DRM?  For music, DRM has become closely and almost exclusively associated with the major music companies and technology platform companies like Apple and Microsoft.  It's worth remembering that the original vision of DRM, as espoused by pioneers like Mark Stefik of Xerox PARC and Victor Shear of Intertrust, was not about major labels or CE vendors; it was fundamentally about offering choice in the market so that the race to the bottom does not happen. 

But now, if more artists try the same thing as Radiohead, the question for the music industry will no longer be about music going DRM-free; it will be about music becoming free, period.  It is important to tease this issue apart from questions of major-label and CE industry economics. On this topic, the normally intelligent and astute venture capitalist Fred Wilson said (presumably with a straight face), "...it's time to come up with new business models to serve the freeloader market."  This remark is especially ridiculous to anyone who sells goods with a non-zero cost of distribution.  Just because content can be reproduced freely does not mean that it was made freely or ought to be free.

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