Steve's Thoughts On Music

Steve Jobs has come up with this piece on music (mostly DRM). Most free thinking people hate the concept of DRM. What it basically does is prevents you from playing your iTunes purchased music on any other device besides your iPod. So effectively, there is no interoperatability.




According to Apple's statistics (or rather, iStatistics), an average iPod contains 1000 songs & out of these only 22 are purchased from iTunes & are protected. Rest of the songs are unprotected i.e no DRM for them.. So basically DRM sucks big time!


According to Thomas Hawk, the reason Steve is taking a stance now is 'cause Apple is a company that has a cult like following. Apple followers are not just geeks, they are zealots.Since in a few more months they are going to unveil the iPhone, they want to make sure that they reach out to these zealots by trashing out the whole DRM concept which doen't make much sense anyhow.


So Steve suggests that we do away with the whole DRM thing.. but that is not upto Apple. The big 4 record labels -- Universal, Sony BMG, EMI & Warner license their music to Apple with a condition that the music should be protected by DRM (Fairplay in Apple's case) in an effort to prevent piracy. But since only a very tiny percentage of their revenue comes from this licensing deal & the rest comes from selling unprotected music on CD's, there is not much sense in continuing with it.

We can easily imagine a world where any device can play music encoded in open formats from any store & any store will sell music that can be played on any device. Utopian? maybe... Possible? Very much.

In any case Apple is laughing all the way to the bank since it has sold over 90 million iPods & even the 2 billion songs by the big four pale in comparison. It is because of this, that industry watchers rave about the marketing genius of Steve Jobs.

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