This is the digital media distribution method that the world needs

I recently posed the question on Reddit: how many of us want a legal way to buy digital media with a sensible pricing structure and no DRM?

The post received ~1500 votes and received ~600 comments - clearly an important topic for a lot of people. Most people seemed to have a distinct idea of what they wanted, unanimous in the notion that such a mechanism doesn't exist. Here is what we need:

1. A sensible pricing structure
No one in their right mind is going to pay $10 for a download when they can buy the physical version for $13. It just doesn't make sense. In the UK a song on iTunes can cost like £0.70. Considering most albums can be had for under £10, a 12 track CD would cost you £8.40 on iTunes or £9.99 for the physical version. No prizes for guessing who wins there. Make an album £2 on the other hand and we might be in business.

2. An online system (like Play.com, Amazon.com, whatever) that acts as a shop
We need a single, massive online system from a big vendor to take control; we don't want 5 accounts at 5 different places, just one that does it all.

3. Buying a digital download should remain in your 'Account' forever
The biggest fear people have with digital media is "but what if my computer dies, I'd have nothing" and this is something that is easy to dispell. If you buy a digital CD from the online marketplace (as noted in #2), the link to download it should remain in your 'My Account' area forever (in the order history). This means that if you suffer hardware failure, all your purchases are marked in your account and you can just re-download them.

4. Buyer protection against illegal downloads
Using the system noted in #3, you'd ideally want to be limited in some capacity. Limiting you by MAC-address or IP would be too restrictive, but limiting you to 1 download a day of each item would make life a lot easier, with a mechanism in place to flag your account under suspicious activity. So if you're downloading all your stuff again and therefore hitting their servers pretty hard, it'd make sense to have to call in and confirm your identity. This should stop pirates from being able to abuse your details.

5. No DRM of any kind. At all. Ever.
You know what bugs me the most about DVD's? If I buy them I'm forced to sit through an unskippable 'anti-piracy' statement that treats me like a pirate. The irony is of course that had I pirated the movie I wouldn't be treated like a pirate... The same theory applies to DRM. If I've paid for it, don't try and tell me whether I can put it on my iPhone or play it on another computer. I (like many other self righteous Internet users) will blacklist you if you dare try to impose DRM upon me - so just don't.

6. Tag the videos I download as mine - maybe?
To avoid this whole DRM issue, why not encode meta-data into the stuff I download explaining that it's me who bought it, therefore if that copy ends up on the Internet - you know where it came from. Sure it's easy to modify media-meta-data but do you really think your DRM is that hard to remove either? Pirates will also pirate, why not focus on making life easy for those of us who try to remain legal?

7. Keep the costs low, keep the overheads low
Does bandwidth really cost that much these days? The overheads on transferring a 100mb CD to me would be much less than the £2 I suggested I pay.

8. Speed probably doesn't matter, it's faster than delivery
For some users speed would matter - it's midnight and you want a film to watch, so you buy "Tropic Thunder" from [wherever] and you want it to download as fast as possible so you can watch it - then you pay a bit extra for express delivery. Me? Well cap me at 50kbs and I'm happy, because it's still quicker the physical delivery and it won't hurt your servers as much.

9. Diversity!!!
There are a few systems that do a similar thing to this that I've seen. One offered a package where for £10 a month you got unlimited, DRM-free music downloads. "Excellent" thought I, as I signed up for a trial. Unfortunately only the most frothy mainstream music was in the catalogue and that won't do for an unflinching metalhead such as myself. For the system to work you need an extensive catalogue. You know why Napster and Kazaa got so popular back in the day? You could find *everything*.

10. Look at someone who has done it well
Steam - love it or hate it has revolutionised the way games are distributed. Introduced for the release of Half Life 2, you buy games online, download them and activate them online too. You get a certain number of activations per game (so if your machine dies and you get another, you use up an activation by re-installing it on the new machine). This method works very, very well. Apparently eMusic is a good system too, offering a similar logic for music.

So why doesn't something like this exist yet? We can send probes to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond, we can land a vehicle on Mars, we can split the atom... Yet somehow we can't come to an agreement on a sensible pricing structure for DRM-free media? Come on...

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