The recent 'DRM-free' music initiatives announced by Apple and Amazon.com will not herald the death of Digital Rights Management (DRM), industry experts predict.

In-Stat believes that the DRM-free model will be viewed as a music industry-only experiment, albeit one that will be closely monitored to see if a viable business model emerges.

“The amount of digital content flowing over telecommunications networks is enormous and growing,” says Mike Paxton, In-Stat analyst.

“Much of this content is already protected by some type of DRM or content protection scheme. As the creation of digital content expands, it is, in turn, fuelling demand for more DRM solutions and content protection technologies.”

A recent research report by In-Stat, Digital Rights Management Update, predicts that forensic DRM technologies, which are used to identify actual end-users of digital content, will see much wider usage in the future.

The study also notes that a significant percentage of US consumers remain ignorant about DRM. In a recent In-Stat survey of US consumers, over 40 per cent of respondents stated that they were not familiar with the term “Digital Rights Management”.