I'm pretty sure you are wrong on this. The labels are very anal about stuff like this, which is why they also went after Internet radio stations because they weren't paying the proper royalties for playing music on their radio shows. There was even a case of a restaurant owned by a celebrity (or was it athlete) in Philadelphia where the music company presented a bill in the tens of thousands because the restaurant had been using an iPod to play mood music without paying royalties. You can bet the labels are wanting to be paid for every additional download, just as they expect you to pay for a new CD if you lost the original or it got scratched up.
Just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in about this.
I think most people don't realize that when you go to a restaurant or are listening to music being played in a elevator or any other public place or business, you are listening to music that the owners of that establishment are probably paying a licensing fee to play.
I worked in a Dance studio for many years and we were advised by our lawyers that we could not even play the radio over our stereo system because it would violate copyright law. If we wanted to pipe music into the studio like that, there was a legal service that we could subscribe to and pay for to do that. We were even concerned that we couldn't play music from our own CD's during a dance lesson without paying royalties but most, if not all dance studios try not to think about that and just do it anyway.
For me, and most of the professional dance instructors that I know of, the iTunes store was a godsend. Prior to that, we would have to bring a CD case of 50-100 CD's of dance music to class. I would typically spend about $15 per CD for a disc that at best had 5-6 songs on it that I could use for teaching. Needless to say, my budget for music was limited and there was a limit to the number of CD's I could lug around with me anyway.
When the store opened, we were in heaven. Now I can purchase any song I want for only $.99! Every song I purchased I could use in class. No song downloaded is wasted. On top of that, iTunes opened new vistas (no pun intended) for previewing music. I quickly found out that many artists had arranged so many of my favorite dance songs in so many interesting ways. I have swing, cha cha, hustle, salsa and foxtrot versions of "Fever" that I can dance to. I found out that Elvis, Madonna, Ray Charles, Love and Rockets, Tito Puente, Rita Coolidge, Joe Cocker and so many artists have all created their own unique and interesting arrangements of this music. This is something I would never have been able to explore, enjoy and benefit from had it not been for the iTunes store. It makes it so simple to explore music. Talk about freedom! Not only that, but since the advent of the iTunes store, while I do not buy CD's at all anymore, this feature alone is responsible for me buying and enjoying more music than I ever did prior to 2002.
And there was another advantage.
I mentioned how many CD's we'd have to carry to class. It gets to be pretty cumbersome and heavy lugging so many CD's around but you had to do it. To cut down on the weight and make things a bit easier on ourselves we'd take the CD's out of the Jewel cases and place them in those carrying cases with the sleeves. That saved a lot of weight and made shlepping the CD's around a lot easier. Problem was, every time you slide a CD out and slide it back into the case you inadvertently, unnoticeably, introduce micro scratches to the surface of the CD. Every day the Salsa CD you have or the Foxtrot CD you play are pulled out, then slid back into its sleeve. Probably several times a day, several days a week, month after month until the playable surface of the disc is so covered with scratches one day a track you want to play wont play because the laser wont track properly and starts to skip that track. If you ever rented a movie from Blockbuster or Netflix or checked out a CD or Movie from the library flip it over and just look at all those scratches. On more than one occasion I've had to repurchase a CD because I just wore it out. These things do not last forever like you think they might.
Anyway, the DRM thing hasn't been an issue to me because now I have my complete music library on an iPod and my laptop that I can hook up to the stereo system in the dance studio and have a greater variety of music that I can teach with than ever before!
