It was composed of more than 200 IT, consumer electronics, security technology, ISP and recording industry companies, as well as authors, composers and publishing rightsholders (represented by CISAC and BIEM representatives, mainly from SGAE/SDAE (Gonzalo Mora Velarde and José Manuel Macarro), GEMA (Alexander Wolf und Thomas Kummer-Hardt), SACEM/SDRM (Aline Jelen, Catherine Champarnaud, Laurent Lemasson), MCPS/PRS (Mark Isherwood), ASCAP, BMI (Edward Oshanani), and SODRAC), Specifically, the goals of the SDMI were to provide consumers with convenient access to music online and in new digital distribution systems, to apply digital rights management restrictions to the work of artists, and to promote the development of new music-related business and technologies.
[1] According to their web site, SDMI existed to develop “technology specifications that protect the playing, storing, and distributing of digital music such that a new market for digital music may emerge.” It would have been used by DataPlay, an optical disc format that at the time was cheaper and had higher capacity than memory cards, and by SD cards.
As part of the process of ratifying the technology the SDMI announced a challenge with their Open Letter to the Digital Community on September 6, 2000.
Felten's group claimed to have cracked the scheme and successfully removed the watermark according to the automated judging software supplied by the SDMI.
On October 15, 1999, Eric Scheirer, later a digital music analyst for Forrester Research, wrote an editorial for MP3.com titled "The End of SDMI"[4] which declared that the group's true goal to fold the technology industry into an alliance that would guarantee the record industry's near monopoly over musical content had failed.