Steve Jobs calls for DRM-free music sales

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.

Tagged as: Apple, copyright, DRM, iPod, Microsoft, mobile