Does it exist anymore? iTunes went DRM free in 2009. Bandcamp is DRM free. Even streaming services can be readily downloaded from with alternative clients. Who's still selling DRM'd music?
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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What you describe is called the "analog loophole". At some point, your media needs to be converted into soundwaves and images. You cannot stop someone from recording those soundwaves and images. But you can make it inconvenient. At the end of the day, it's a numbers game. A lot of people don't want to spend hours of their time recording, cutting and labelling music, and are okay with paying a bit of money to get the end result, nicely packaged. The people who are willing to spend the time and effort to copy it are likely those that would not have paid anyway, since they are likely broke students, idealists and the like.
I guess it's like a CAPTCHA. It doesn't completely solve the problem the hoster wishes to solve, but it deters a lot of people from trying.
DRM for music is largely a thing of the past.
As to why it ever existed, company executives, they saw piracy and wanted to try and stop it, thats it.
DRM for music was never really effective.
All DRM is like a padlock. It only stops people who don’t really want to break it in the first place.
DRM: Giving people a lock, the key, and unlimited time to play around.
Because before internet was source of media someone invented DVD region locks in the first place, all corporate followed with dividing world to regions and now we're stuck with this crap. File DRM is just second iteration because the people were already hired, structures were already established so they just build it on the region lock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_lockout
It's mostly to avoid a lossless capture, recording it will lead to quality loss.
Most people don't care, so they'll download whatever they can.
Yep, username checks out.
DRM is not free, somebody is getting paid to provide that DRM and they certainly don't go unpaid if it doesn't work.
Napster
Who still distributes music files with DR?
Spotify
Spotify sells music now? I thought they were a subscription-only service.
It really isn't. Unless you download from spotify or apple music to your phone.