billso.com

As reported in today’s New York Times and BoingBoing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has apparently changed his company’s strategy regarding digital music. He’s done it in a very public fashion - with an article on the Apple web site. (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/)

The iTunes Store sells digital music files that are copy protected, using a form of digital rights management (DRM). DRM is a set of rules developed by publishers and enforced by software that limit how a digital file can be used. Apple’s FairPlay DRM makes it difficult to move music purchased on iTunes from one computer to another.

Jobs proposes two alternatives - the status quo and an industry-wide adoption of FairPlay - before recommending a third choice: selling digital without DRM, most likely in the popular MP3 format that almost every digital music player supports.

iTunes biggest legal competitor, eMusic, has sold 100 million songs without DRM. Jobs also provides calculations that indicate Aple has sold only 22 songs to the average iPod user, even though many iPods are “full”.

If the record companies really are selling 20 billion songs a year without any DRM at all, as Jobs claims, then the current iTunes model has to change.

Several European countries have sued Apple over the DRM used in iTunes. Last week, the major music publishers held a summit to discuss selling music without DRM. Jobs is telling these countries that Apple isn’t the impediment - it’s the music publishers that wanted Apple to use DRM in the first place. Of course, there’s more than one side to every story.