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.

[image source]

Close Encounters of the Apple kind

Although my professional loyalties remain with the guys at Redmond, I have had an unabashed admiration for most of the products rolled out by Apple Computer..err..Apple Inc. I mean.

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in the MACWORLD Expo in San Francisco amidst an entire legion of MAC followers who do not belong to any religious cult but would be willing to take lives to get their hands on the latest uber-cool device by Apple.

The iPhone is not just another phone.. It is yet another testimony of Steve's genius & Apples larger than life vision of bringing a beautiful & magnificent piece of technology to gadget hungry markets.
The hugely popular & ubiquitous iPod which I guess has become not just a super cool digital device but a symbol of a new breed of 'digitally-wired-always-on-the-move' demographic. Apple is hoping to replicate the same kind of success that it enjoyed with the iPod.
And we have the iPhone which is a phone(duh?), an iPod & an internet device all rolled into one piece of artistic brilliance.

His Jobsness has this uncanny ability to influence even non MAC users & has a borderline hypnotic effect on all of us. His almost evangelical persona creates an illusion & hold us in awe. He gives us these shiny metal thingies which we didn't know we wanted & makes us believe that possessing it can actually transform us into 'Happy Human Beings'.. & it really does.There were hordes of mp3 players but the iPod was a far cry from all the stuff that was out there.

So what's gonna happen to the Nokias & Motorolas of the world? Well only time will tell whether Apple can hynotize mass markets or will it remain another internet enabled device that you cannot do without..

Technical deficiencies (2G, disconnect with Apples iTunes music store..) are a few but the highly intuitive user interface more than makes up for it.

Check out the snapshots.
Also check out why Apple makes us cry.

[image source: engadget]