Ryan was about to sign up for PeerImpact, a P2P service that distributes authorized, royalty-paid music, when he discovered that the company wraps all its media in restrictive DRM. Instead of sending them some money, he sent them an email explaining why he wouldn't use their service:
I'm all for buying music, making sure the artists are compensated and the major labels get their cubic meters of money to continue suing their customers. What I (and everyone else O know) will not stand for is a product that uses a protection scheme that ruins the experience. If the service used standard compliant MP3 files, I'd have signed up and filled my 2 gigs of storage on my handheld, yes it's a windows mobile device, it has mobile media player 10 that can handle the crippled files you hare selling. The fact is while my device can use your DRM, I won't. Simple as that.
Thanks for the attempt, man you guys almost have the ideal business model, once you support a non crippled file format, Holy smokes, you guys will be huge.
(Thanks, Ryan!)
