EMI announced that every single CD it sells from now on will be free of DRM, and thus open to personal format shifting, such as the world should be. This means no DRM audio CD’s will be released anymore. In 2002 Bretelsmann (record companies BMG, Arista and RCA) were the first to use DRM. Initially this was done on CD’s that were sent out as promotion to music stores, radio stations and music reporters. Later on all CD’s from those companies were DRM’ed so people could not play the CD’s on their computer anymore. Computers running Windows even crashed when people attempted to play such CD’s. The objective was that people could not easily copy CD’s at home to sell to friends or distribute through the internet. Other record companies also started using DRM but over time, one after the other stopped DRM’ing their CD’s. The DRM software has to be renewed constantly to fight cracking. In addition it didn’t work very well. Protected CD’s could sometimes not be played on devices that were supposed to play them, such as some car CD players.

There was more criticism on the security. In 2005 Sony BMG had to recall millions of CD’s due to it’s DRM technology. When people would try to play it’s protected CD’s on their computers, it would install software without notification or confirmation. Virus writers used Sony’s DRM technology weak spots and could even open up back doors into a user’s computer, giving full access to hackers. Another complaint came from consumer rights organisations. They complained that people could not copy CD’s for their own private use while that is legally allowed [in The Netherlands].