DRM Solutions to Grow Despite DRM-free Music Initiatives

The recent “DRM-free” music tracks that were announced by Apple and Amazon.com do not herald the death of Digital Rights Management (DRM), reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). Instead, the DRM-free model will likely be viewed as a music industry-only experiment, albeit one that will be closely monitored to see if a viable business model emerges, the high-tech market research firm says.

“The amount of digital content flowing over telecommunications networks is enormous and growing,” says Mike Paxton, In-Stat analyst. “Much of this content is already protected by some type of DRM or content protection scheme. As the creation of digital content expands, it is, in turn, fueling demand for more DRM solutions and content protection technologies.”

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

Forensic DRM technologies, which are used to identify actual end-users of digital content, will see much wider usage in the future.

A significant percentage of US consumers remain ignorant about DRM. In a recent In-Stat survey of US consumers, over 40% of respondents stated that they were not familiar with the term “Digital Rights Management.”

However, DRM is a familiar topic for a growing number of consumers. Forty-five percent of the same survey respondents stated that they had either purchased or used some type of media product with integrated DRM or content protection technology.