The Butt Ugly Weblog

Steve Jobs on music

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple just posted a long article on the future of music to apple.com. The man should really have a blog...

Anyhoo, he makes a few interesting points:

• If Apple's iTunes DRM is broken, they have to fix it in a small number of weeks or lose the entire music catalogue. A big risk, I would say.
• Under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. Therefore, Jobs argues, iTunes DRM does not cause lock-in to iPods. Yet.
• If Apple were to license their DRM to other players, it would be impossible to issue fixes once DRM gets broken. A fair point - any DRM which is widely spread is no DRM after a while.
• "The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system."
• Apple would like to get rid of DRM: "Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

All in all, a good article. It looks like Apple is the winner no matter what happens - if people keep insisting on DRM, then they will get the lock-in, and if DRM is abolished, Apple saves itself from loads of problems...