Yankee Group calls for an end to DRM

[The three components of Yankee Group's Anywhere theme]

Andrew Jaquith at Yankee Group was nice enough to send me one of their recent research pieces, titled Kill DRM, Vol. I: EMI's Move Underscores the Power of the Anywhere Consumer. As you might guess from the title, it nicely dovetails with our two recent articles, one on why we believe Apple will reject subscription music and the other on Apple's deal with EMI for DRM-free music, but takes the ideas even further. Yankee argues that content owners must stop fighting and embrace DRM-free distribution by:

1. tracking instead of restricting content,


2. pretending file sharing services are legitimate and competing on quality instead,


3. embracing DRM-free music and driving volume,


4. thinking virally and channeling the passion of movie and music lovers, and


5. uniting with consumer electronics manufacturers to drive consumption.

It's a great piece and well worth the time to read it. I'm particularly taken with Yankee's concept of the Anywhere Consumer and its rising power vis a vis the content providers. It's a powerful idea and one that I think we'll be hearing about for years to come.

I must say that I've become very impressed with the work of Yankee Group since Emily Green took over the company. I used to think of Yankee as an old-school telecom research company, but under Emily's leadership, Yankee seems to have taken on new life and punch, particularly in consumer research. I'm particularly impressed with the alignment of many lines of research under one huge "Anywhere" theme. It's the type of coherent, big picture approach to research Forrester used to have, but which seemingly died after Forrester acquired Giga and the explosion of topics that Forrester decided to cover.

It's nice to see good, focused research lives on. In today's environment of the tyranny of too much, we all can use such distilled insight.

Technorati Tags: Anywhere, Consumers, DRM, EMI, Emily Green, Yankee Group