Digital music faces incompatible formats

Digital online music has become a big industry. The portable digital-music-player market is also booming. While these portend a bright future, the digital-music industry faces a major potential problem: content purchased in one format will not necessarily run on players based on a different format. These incompatibility problems confuse customers, which could cause many potential purchasers to avoid legitimate online music suppliers and either buy from other suppliers or continue using CDs. This, in turn, would limit the digital music industry's growth. The music industry, including the major record labels, would thus like to see the problem go away through interoperability and, for some proponents, open digital-music standards.