An enterprising academic at the University of Toronto has completed a paper analysing the effects of removal of DRM from legitimate music downloads.
This was made possible by four different major music labels have content where they initially released albums with full copyright protection in place and then later dropped the DRM on those same albums. After collating the statistics Laurina Zhang found an interesting pattern.
The ongoing average revenue from the albums after DRM was dropped increased 10%. While the more popular albums (and therefore more appealing to the average pirate) did not increase the results show there was no actual loss of revenue from the removal of copyright protection. It also showed that the longer the music was kept in a DRM free state the more consistently it kept selling.
So we have just another sign that the locking down of content does not actually assist sales in any way, in fact the more a company allows the end customer to treat their purchase as their own property the better it sells. Here's hoping one day the message actually gets through!
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