Ian Rogers from Yahoo! Music Unlimited posted a comprehensive, thoughtful, and insightful article about how DRM is restricting users, and has set the music industry back 8 years.

A lot of people share this sentiment (including myself), but what makes Ian different is that he is in a position to make a difference. What struck me most is how difficult DRM makes it for companies to actually give you, the customer, what you want:

“Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.”

Because of DRM and licensing issues, it’s inordinately complex to get your iTunes music into your workouts. Have purchased music from iTunes, and it’s iTunes Plus? Great! Not iTunes plus? Not so great! You’ll have to burn the tracks to CD, re-import your tracks, overwrite the old ones, and try not to notice the drop in quality. Then, you can mix them with your workout, as it should have been from the beginning.

We’ve been working on another solution to this problem for almost 2 years, but the fact is, DRM may be dead soon, which will be good for everyone. Apple says they don’t want it, Yahoo! refuses to use it, and the customer certainly doesn’t want it. What can we do?

The best thing we can do is to vote with our dollars, and to support businesses like Amazon MP3 (or, I assume, an upcoming version of Yahoo! Music) that do not employ DRM. It’s not only more convenient, it tells the music industry executives that they aren’t in charge of what you do with the music you own.