Customise me, Jessica!

In an innovative move by Yahoo's music channel, they have released a DRM-free personalised MP3 by Jessica Simpson. The personalisation is quite simple, you can pick a person's name to incorporate into the song, but provides a proof of concept. The Yahoo! Music blog provides a bit of background and feedback putting forward a point we haven't heard much about before, the cost of implementing DRM:

"Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform... It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!"

Great to see ideas emerging for alternative business models that use the mass customisation potiential of technology to open up rather lock down music and other downloadable media.

Tags: drm, music, personalized music, Yahoo! music