DRM Has No Benefits to Sell
I'm stunned that people are buying DRM'd music. I suspect most of these people would be non-IT types (casual PC users). Ask an iTunes customer if they know what DRM is and they'll probably look at you blankly. How can they be expected to work within the confines technology they do not understand?
I'm mentioning this because I got my second issue of Rolling Stone with free, download-able music (read my first experience). Again the service was provided by Soundbuzz Online Music Store. Again, nothing was mentioned that Internet Explorer is a requirement to download the music. Again the experience was far from smooth.
I punched in my download code and was presented with a link to down all tracks, and links for each individual track. At the bottom of the page was visible HTML/JavaScript code due to poor coding. I clicked the link to download all tracks. A popup appeared and no page loaded but the download started. The download finished and as I suspected the license file hadn't imported so the tracks wouldn't play. Fortunately I was familiar with the process this time, knowing that the license file should be imported after I clicked the download link but before the tracks are downloaded (a part of the page that didn't load). I clicked the download link again but it still didn't import the license. So I had to click each individual track link, one by one, and then wait for the license for each track to import, then cancel the download of that track (since I already downloaded all the tracks). Of course, now I have to burn the music onto CD then rip it to MP3 so I can listen to them. I can't do anything with WMA files.
Did I mention that when you download all tracks it comes as one file? So if you want to listen to one song, you have to load the whole album. Doesn't sound so bad? I should probably mention that there is a significant delay before you can listen to the music because it takes so long for the license information to load. Imagine if you want to pick songs from different albums and you have to wait for each album to load, and each license file.
I went through this because the tracks were free. Why would anyone pay to have these sorts of problems? Most users aren't going to have a clue why the music won't play after they downloaded it. Most people won't have the technical background to understand why music they paid for can't be put onto their iPod. Why would anyone pay for inferior, restrictive and malfunctioning music when you can get a CD that simple works (in most cases). Compare the pros and cons of DRM music with CD's and CD's will win hands down. There is not a single benefit to buying DRM music , with the exception of price, and the ability to buy a single track from an album.
I can appreciate that Soundbuzz is probably one of the crappier online music stores and that purchasing music from iTunes would be far better, but it's still inferior sounding music, and the customer has to understand the restrictions of DRM.
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