In the recording industry’s latest move away from its reliance on digital locks to reduce piracy, the Warner Music Group said on Thursday that it would sell songs and albums without anticopying software through Amazon’s fledgling digital music service. The shift by Warner Music is another step in the decline of copy-protection software, which has led to consumer confusion over the jumble of incompatible schemes governing the use of digital music players and downloaded songs. Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. Sony BMG Music Entertainment has continued to hold out, though it is expected to experiment with selling MP3s through a promotion early next year.
Warner, which releases music by artists including Josh Groban and Matchbox Twenty, was considered to be particularly reluctant to drop restrictions on copying. In February, after Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, called on the major record companies to abandon D.R.M., Edgar Bronfman, Warner’s chairman, retorted that since movies and games carry copy protection, the notion of withdrawing it from music was “completely without logic or merit.” Warner’s move comes roughly four months after the industry’s biggest company, Universal Music Group, part of Vivendi, said it would sell music without restrictions through an array of services, including digital stores run by Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon, but not iTunes. Is this the final end of D.R.M.? We all hope so…