Dave Matthews Band fans are part of a group music listeners stuck between a rock and a hard place thanks to DRM or digital rights management.

According to Wikipedia, DRM is "an umbrella term referring to any of several technical methods used to control or restrict the use of digital media content on electronic devices..."

Creating and selling discs that use some form of DRM is meant to discourage "casual" or "simple" piracy such as simply making an extra copy of a disc and handing it to your friend.

Who Wants to Restrict My Media Rights?

Dave Matthews Band's label, BMG is concerned with music piracy. They don't want you to rip them off. iTunes also has DRM built into songs you download from them. These tracks are not supposed to play on other people's computers. There are precautions in place to keep you from handing a new single you bought to a friend.

A problem shows up when a user wants to transfer a piece of music across differing DRM schemes such as from a MediaMax protected CD to iTunes. So long as the user owns both the disc and the iPod, this is a perfectly legitimate and legal action to take. However, Apple doesn't want iTunes users to be able to import music that has been protected by DRM's from companies they compete with such as Microsoft's online music store MSN Music.

Is iTunes the Problem?

iTunes is currently the dominant force in the digital music community and has shown its ability to force artists to play by their rules. (See April 2005 article, DMB Caves to iTunes Distribution Method.)

Whether iTunes will open up its DRM because of market pressures or by its own accord, the current lack of an open standard of agreement regarding how music should be protected meant Dave Matthews Band fans were caught in the middle of this DRM war with the recent release of Stand Up.

Stand Up, DMB's newest studio album was encoded using SunnComm's MediaMax protection technology. This technology allows a CD to be ripped exclusively into Windows Media Player into files Windows Media Files or WMA's.

Once the album hit the shelves, fans immediately ran into problems when they went to rip the CD. Some were able to resolve the problems by simply holding down the shift-key, while others had no luck adding the music to their iTunes.

The fans had enough trouble that the DMB's management had to address the problem by posting an iTunes work-around for the CD's copy protection. "Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod" begins eight paragraphs of step-by-step instructions. The page closes with the chilling:

"Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above."

The page even provides a link to Apple's feedback page, indicating that fans should bend Apple's ear about how they are hurting their music-listening experience. Dave Matthews Band, being historically very fan-friendly has perhaps reacted the strongest to the problem with defiant posting of a workaround.

Foo Fighters Leave Fans Stuck, Switchfoot Fans have Better Luck

Fans of the Foo Fighters who purchased their newest disc, In Your Honor, will find a short note at the bottom of that album's official page reading:

"In Your Honor was pressed with copy protection precautions to protect the artist rights. These precautions are not intended to infringe on any Fair Use rights of the fans and customers who purchased the record."

A link reading "Information and instructions on transferring the music to your digital player" actually takes you to a SunComm webpage that also suggests fans write to Apple about opening up their DRM. and "that said, while there is no direct support on the disc for iTunes or iPod, SONY BMG has worked out an indirect way for consumers to move content into these environments, despite the challenges noted above." This is followed by a link to contact technical support, not instructions.

The band Switchfoot's label had protection added on their newest disc "Nothing Is Sound." The band's fans had so many problems getting the CD onto their iPods that Switchfoot's guitarist Tim Foreman posted a link to CDEX, a peice of open-source software that circumvents the protection of the CD. This post was subsequently removed but still can be read in full here.

Who's Looking Out For Fans?

Civil liberty and digital rights folk like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take big offense to any change that directly or indirectly chip away at the fair-use rights of consumers. Thanks to bands like Switchfoot and Dave Matthews band they aren't alone in watching out for music fans until DRM issues are worked between iTunes and just about everyone else.

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