What is Digital Rights Management?

In the context of music, artists are entitled to royalties when their music is played publicly. In traditional music distribution systems, such as Radio or TV, there were a limited number of broadcasters and collection of royalties was relatively straightforward.

With the advent of computers and the Internet, there has been a proliferation of non-traditional broadcasters, and it has become much easier to copy music and distribute it, using the new technologies. Unfortunately, not everyone using these technologies has subscribed to the traditional royalties model, and there has been much publicity about illegal download sites.

So how do law-abiding businesses make the most of the advantages that the new technologies offer, whilst protecting themselves from allegations that they are not protecting the music that they distribute?

First they must source their music legitimately. For businesses such as Retailers, Restaurants and Hoteliers, there are many reputable Content Providers who offer a full music programming service; Barix partners with several such firms. However, sometimes it makes sense for a business to have locally stored content (music files) - for example as a backup source in case the main network audio feed fails. In this case, Barix can help; the Barix Streaming Client firmware is available in a version that supports the playback of encrypted music files.

If you want to find out more about DRM, Wikipedia has an extensive article: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management]