Axehole

Yahoo! wants you to have A Public Affair with Jessica Simpson, with no strings attached, for $1.99.

Yahoo! is selling personalized versions of the new Jessica Simpson song A Public Affair from their Yahoo! Music web site, and they’ve added a few kinks to make it interesting.

First, you can select a personalized version of the track and get it with customized with your name (a large list of names is available. More interesting, though, is that the track is delivered as an MP3, with no DRM.

“We’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now,” says Yahoo!’s Ian C. Rogers. “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.”

“We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. 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!” adds Rogers. “And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.”

The real question, though, is whether it will be more valuable to record companies…..

via Yahoo! Music Blog