News.com reports the comments of a founder of the MP3 standard, saying what we've all known all along: the number one roadblock to growth in the online music biz is not piracy, but DRM.

"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute in Ilemenau, Germany.

Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-size device, play music and videos on their mobile phones, and buy albums at the click of a button.

But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and antipiracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.

Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Sony each have developed proprietary playback and DRM (digital rights management) antipiracy technologies. Songs bought on Apple's iTunes music store can play only on Apple iPods. Ditto for Sony.

The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.

Via Ren Bucholz @ miniLinks, a fascinating article on the UK's digital radio market and the products that will let listeners copy/pause/replay anything they can tune:

More than 20 years after MTV aired "Video Killed the Radio Star," the original broadcast medium is moving to reclaim the cutting edge of technology with music downloads over the radio.

...A digital radio already on the market, the 'Bug' from the UK's Pure Digital, lets users record programs -- including songs that would be flawless except for DJ chatter -- and export them to a computer, where they can be loaded onto a portable music player like Apple's iPod or burned to a disc.

Says Ren, "these are exactly the kinds of devices that would be affected by the digital radio broadcast flag (PDF) currently being considered by the FCC."

The debate on DRM technology Audible Magic's CopySense continues, with Ed Felten adding his thoughts to Chris Palmer's and Ernest's. Felten wonders if it isn't even possible to defeat CopySense without resorting to encryption. "It may turn out -- and I suspect it would, if independent experts were able to study Audible Magic's technology -- that copyrighted music files could be tweaked in a way that made them undetectable to Audible Magic's algorithms, while still sounding fine to typical human listeners." Ah, the hand is quicker than the eye.

The RIAA has been touting technologies offered by Audible Magic as the cure for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on university campuses. The company has also been making the rounds of congressional offices in Washington, DC, talking up its technologies as a silver bullet for P2P infringement.

It's critical that universities take steps to educate staff and students about copyright law, as well as to control excessive bandwidth usage. At the same time, it's important that universities are not sold expensive, ineffective solutions simply to appease the public relations needs of the RIAA. My EFF colleague Chris Palmer took a close look at how Audible Magic's "filtering" technology works and argues that it's no silver bullet.

"Session encryption for file transfers based on ephemeral keys represents a cheap, easily implemented countermeasure that would effectively frustrate Audible Magic's filtering technology," writes Palmer. "Based on publicly available information, it does not appear that this vulnerability can be easily remedied. Should Audible Magic's technology be widely adopted, it is likely that P2P file-sharing applications would be revised to implement encryption. Accordingly, network administrators will want to ask Audible Magic tough questions before investing in the company's technology, lest the investment be rendered worthless by the next P2P 'upgrade.'"

Check out the complete analysis on the EFF website.