Billboard Talks About the End of DRM

In a blog posting by Billboard today, it was revealed that many more labels and retailers are preferring MP3 distribution as they see the tipping point regarding the death of DRM music.

In the test Universal Media Group is currently running, they’re reporting 85% of the sales are for MP3… DRM sales have fallen to 15%!

Pepsi is also leading the pack in a deal with Amazon for giving away 1 billion free MP3s using Amazon’s new MP3 download service, which is slated to begin next February during the Super Bowl. Pepsi's last major music involvement provided consumers with about 5 million free songs from iTunes (which Apple promptly reported in their overall "downloads", sneaky sneaky).

Here's a bit of trivia: Pepsi was willing to give up to 100 million free songs away, 95 million more than what was actually downloaded: guess consumers weren't chomping at the bit to snatch up rights-managed songs -- no matter how free they were.

Looks like the music industry is realizing DRM doesn’t help their relationship with consumers… is the movie/TV industry about to follow the same path?