Steve Jobs published a long rant (“Thoughts on Music“) about iPod, iTunes and DRM in the Hot News section of the Apple website.
Techmeme is going crazy with this discussions on Jobs’ thoughts. With his rant Jobs seem to take a position alongside anti-DRM crowd and sort of blames major record labels for its existence. The writing is a very well thought out piece which gives a background on how Apple iTunes made landmark deals with record labels.
Jobs goes on to make the point that only 3% of iPods hold music with DRM from Apple according to the accurate data that they have and goes on to say that he can’t understand how this is regarded as an iPod-iTunes lock-in.
Today?s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
He further points at the number of actual CDs that hold music without DRM and makes the point that there are already mess amount of music without DRM. This forms the basis of his points where he points at the record labels and asks why they insist on DRM on digital music downloads when there are so many CDs sold without any protection.
Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That?s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
Steve Jobs claims that Apple would embrace selling music without DRM if record labels stop asking for it. He sends a message to Europe as well (probably because of the recent Norway case) and invites them to work for persuading the record labels who are largely owned by European corporations.
My take on this is pretty much like Read/Write Web’s. Even though Apple seems to be on the side of anti-DRM crowd, this sounds too much like a propaganda and for some reason does not really sound very sincere to me.
Everybody knows that record labels are not really embracing the digital world and the image that Jobs is trying to reflect seems too weak for a party that could have a strong impact on how record labels think about digital music.
Technorati Tags: thoughts on music, apple, steve jobs, ipod, itunes, drm, fairplay
[tags]music, digital music, drm, apple [/tags]
I can see how trust in someone in a position like Jobs’ should be taken with care. But in Jobs’ defense he has always come off as more of a visionary, interested in the potential of technology, rather than purely the money, which makes me think twice. Hopefully he’s sincere. However, we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out.
Thanks for reading and commenting hthth. As you say, only time will tell if he was sincere or not. I kinda chose to think the opposite in this post but I sincerely hope that he was sincere