It seems that music executives aren’t as out of touch with general opinion as people think… the BBC writes on a study by Jupiter Research showing that many music industry executives think that removing DRM from downloads would increase the sale of those downloads. “62 percent believed that dropping DRM and releasing music files that can be enjoyed on any MP3 player would boost the take-up of digital music generally. However, Mr Mulligan pointed out that this percentage changed depending on which sector of the industry was answering...Among all record labels 48 percent of all executives thought ending DRM would boost download sales - though this was 58 percent at the larger labels. Outside the record labels 73 percent of those questioned thought dropping DRM would be a boost for the whole market.”
Despite this, labels are sticking with the technology because they see it as a way to protect their rights—although there is some talk that DRM will morph into something is “used to manage these rights and monitor what people did with music rather than stop them”.
PaidContent has a post on the music industry imagining a post-DRM world…