This autumn is a busy time for digital music in the UK: next-generation iPods, eMusic launching in Europe, the announcement (but not launch) of the advertisement-supported SpiralFrog and Microsoft’s new ‘Zune’ MP3 player, promised for the Christmas market.
From a lawyer’s perspective, eMusic may be the most radical of these developments, because its business model, while involving payment, does not involve the digital rights management technologies which are used by the rest of the industry to limit the onward distribution of digital copies, albeit with limited success.
