News came out yesterday that Apple will be providing a a three-tier pricing model for DRM free music and the world doesn’t seem to care.  

Apple – actually the whole music industry – seems to forget that there is no such thing as Digital Rights Management.  Yes, there is “DRM” but there is no way to enforce the consumer to use it as it can be easily broken…. it’s called a CD burner.

All a person needed to do is burn a CD with music that has “DRM protection” and then rip a new batch of MP3s from the newly minted CD.  Now, I know there will be a group of people who will claim that sound quality will be lost during the process, and there every well may some small quality loss, but it is minimal for the everyday user.  Chances are the person who utilized this process wouldn’t even notice the difference.  

In the end this may save the consumer a few dimes but I don’t think this will be a big help but the final nail in the DRM coffen.  Oh, and in case you haven’t been paying attention, Amazon.com has provided DRM free music for some time via their Amazon Music Store…

And here it begins, the Retail Industry wants help due to the poor economy.  No one is asking for a bailout, yet, they are asking President-elect Barack Obama to add a series of sales tax-exempt shopping days…

The National Retail Federation called for three periods of sales tax-free shopping that would last 10 days each in March, July and October 2009. The trade group estimates that it would save consumers about $20 billion, or $175 per family.

 

Under the industry group’s proposal, which would exclude alcohol and tobacco sales, the federal government would reimburse states for the lost tax revenue. State sales tax rates range from 2.9% to 7.25%, the group said. The five states without a sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — would also receive monies.

 

Without swift, additional Congressional measures, the current economic weakness could worsen, creating a more rapid downward spiral — beyond what economists are predicting for 2009 — in the years ahead,” the NRF said.

The retailers are setting the groundwork for asking for federal aid.  

Here is an interesting note – Amazon.com says the best holiday shopping ever. What they fail to mention is how much revenue was pulled in.  They are simply reporting how many items were sold.

UPDATE: TechCrunch has a breakout of the number of items ordered.

I will be the first to come out and say I was wrong with regards to the Amazon Kindle.  The hardware looks odd, almost clunky, the screen is grayscale and the internally memory on the machine is quite limited. I truly didn’t see the appeal.  

I mean, why not use a tablet PC or simply a PDA?  Sure, a laptop may be a bit heavier (and more expensive) and a PDA may be a bit smaller, but both options really seemed more appealing to me.  There are a number of users, however, that do see the appeal – an expected 378,000 users to be more specific.  While it’s not the 3 million iPhones Apple sold, it is still impressive.

The USA Today has decided to join The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Chicago Tribune with Kindle subscriptions. But are they still hurting?  Because the companies have not divested themselves of other activities taking away from their core business – publishing news.

Gannett, the company publishing the USA Today, owns a number of daily papers (as well as TV stations).  It will be interesting to see what other papers go onto the Kindle, and if the sell off their TV stations….

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter if the print media does go all digital if no distribution platform is in place.  At 378K devices in the marketplace, that is hardly enough to support all the major publishers on the market.

And for the record, no subscription price has been released as of it.