DRM and music research

A music researcher writes about how he is stymied by DRM. Music delivered on vinyl and CD is amenable to being analyzed and tweaked by scientists looking to do stuff like similarity classification, but if you can only play music (and not feed the encrypted iTunes/WMA/Real/Napster songs into your own software) then downloaded music is off-limits to this kind of work, which, ironically, is just the kind of work that enabled all the downloadable music services to begin with.

Developing MP3, for example, surely required a lot of experimentation with popular music to field test and refine the codec. How will the developers of MP3's replacement perform comparable tests on an iTunes track?

Soon, we may lose all programmatic access to our music. As more digital music is sold (iTunes) or rented (napster) more of our music is wrapped up in a DRM container. The only thing we can do with such music is to play it with an authorized player. Doing anything else with the bits is forbidden. Even trying to get at the bits is forbidden thanks to the DMCA.

There are lots of things music consumers could do with the bits: music similarity classification, beat and tempo detection, cross fading from one song to another. There are many more things that MIR researchers can do with the bits. All will be lost if all of the bits are taken away from us. Our music will become 'listen-only'.

Link (Thanks, David!)