I'm not wrong...

Some record companies have started making material available to buy as soon as it's available to hear, resolving a problem I blogged about, in my foresighted way, in June 2008. The sagacity I am tooting is rather undercut by the fact that one of the things I was thinking of at the time, when I talked about hearing singles and being frustrated that I couldn't buy them at once, was Lady Gaga's Just Dance, which I had blogged about a few days earlier. I heard it on popjustice, wanted to buy it but couldn't, and worried that I'd never hear anything about her again.  The song wasn't released in the UK until the following January, but somehow something jogged my memory about her existence.

Leaving that detail aside, this new music industry policy basically proves that I must be right about ebooks and DRM.  I stripped the kindle DRM off one of my books the other night just to see if I could.  The method works for other sorts of ebook DRM too.  I can't be bothered to do them all because I'm certainly not going to pass them on and I've got them all backed up, but it's laughably easy.  I did it while watching the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, and the latter was the geekier of the two occupations.  Hear me, publishers, alienating your core fan base with daftly high prices is a really bad idea from the consequences of which DRM is not going to protect you.