Universal Uncripples Music, Cripples Music Retailing

The publisher of your favorite book. The studio which made your favorite film. The record label of your favorite recording artist. These are not things the average consumer should ever have to know. If you're in the industry, they're crucial. If you're a big fan, they can be interesting. Every so often, a label turns into a brand: Penguin books have a following, as do certain record labels, like Motown, Def Jam, or Deutsche Grammophon. But it's never something necessary for enjoyment of the content.

Until now.

Universal Music has made the eminently sensible decision to start selling its music online without DRM. There are lots of good reasons for this, but there also seems to be one overriding not-so-good reason: to try to chip away at the dominance that the iTunes Music Store has in online music sales.

There seems to be a very good chance that at some point in the near future, Universal's music will be available for purchase online, DRM-free. If you buy it at Amazon or Google or anywhere else, you will be able to put it on your iPod with only a tiny amount more effort than is involved when you buy music from the iTunes Music Store. But you won't be able to buy it at the iTunes Music Store.

So now consumers, when they're browsing the iTunes Music Store, will have to give up and go to some utterly unrelated website if they want to buy Universal's music. And of course there's no easy way of knowing what record label a given song is on.

I'm very happy that Universal is experimenting with uncrippling its music. But I do hope it doesn't cripple online music retailing in doing so. Apple is perfectly happy to sell DRM-free music on the iTunes Music Store, Let's hope that Universal comes to its senses and lets it do so.