Dig­i­tal music and dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment has been a bone of con­tention for sev­eral years now. The music labels con­tin­u­ally cry foul as they allege that ille­gal music down­loads are doing them irrepara­ble harm while well-​​founded research seems to indi­cate the opposite.tuneout.gif

My per­sonal opin­ion is that DRM, as envis­aged by the labels and gen­er­ally exe­cuted is bro­ken — it stops me get­ting access to the music I want to lis­ten to in the way I want. It’s either restricted in place for lis­ten­ing (CD, lim­ited num­ber of com­put­ers, etc.) or restricted in for­mat (tried get­ting iTunes bought music out of iTunes and onto a non-​​iTunes friendly device? Doable, but not for amateurs).

Now, a cou­ple of enter­pris­ing Aussies, Jared Mad­den and Adam Pur­cell have put together tune​-out​.com as a response to the wail­ing of the labels and in par­tic­u­lar to the industry-​​funded film, Aus­tralian Music In Tune, that is being pushed as edu­ca­tional and which the indus­try wants used in schools as a part of courses on media and copyright.

There’s even a fairly high pro­file story about Fren­zal Rhomb’s Lind­say McDougall being duped into appear­ing in the film on the under­stand­ing that it was about the strug­gle to make it as a musi­cian in Aus­tralia. There’s no appar­ent response from the music indus­try at this point, but if the McDougall story is accu­rate, the music indus­try types con­tinue to play unfair and fast and loose with the truth in order to push their ever less believ­able message.

Not cool.

Tune Out’s rai­son d’être is on their home page and states in part:

There is no dig­i­tal music bat­tle or piracy war. That is a fig­ment of your imag­i­na­tion, and, every time you preach our dig­i­tal crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged rant­ing. Your declin­ing prof­its are the symp­tom of a busi­ness model that is fast becom­ing irrelevant.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

Damn straight! I’ve signed their state­ment and mes­sage to the labels. If you’re inter­ested, I sug­gest you do to.

Sydney-​​based journo and com­menter on all things dig­i­tal, Stil­gher­rian, has more detail.