Penguin Audio Leaves Emusic Due to Piracy Concerns

Posted 1 year ago at 5:49 pm. 0 comments
Posted in DRM Free.

Lets play the commen sense roulette and explain what this means to any of you publishers out there wishing to sell music or audiobooks on Emusic, and others. 

Digital Rights Management - Free

Penguin Audio recently listed their audiobooks to be sold on Emusic. Emusic is known for selling music without Digital Rights Management. After you purchase a song you are free to put it in whatever music player you want to. Your even able to send music to your friends and file share them to others (although Emusic does not advocate you to do this). Thats the whole freedom of selling Mp3s. Its already apparrent that music from the Electronic Genres have been selling Mp3s for years and are even selling them directly from their own webpages without a label. As with Radiohead, and others, as a musician you might no longer need to have a label to promote your music. I mean its going to be tough to get people to buy it, but thats what concerts are for. 

Sweatin’ to Books on Tape

Penguin Audio also sells audiobooks on iTunes, which sells most music under Digital Rights Management. This means you can only listen to it from the computer or iPod you bought it from. Companies can restrict the license even further to allow you to listen to a song for a few times a month (Windows Media Audio files protected with Digital Rights Management have been known to do this in the past). So why in the world did Penguin Audio agree to sell their own audiobooks? Without digital rights management, anyone can do whatever they want with their files after they purchase it. Whats even more weird is that they didn’t find any pirated files, but suddenly they are "concerned about piracy." Not that the audiobook piracy market is big anyways, who would want to bring Tuesdays With Morrie to the gym anyway?