Steve Jobs on DRM and the online music industry

This response to Steve's missive from a Norwegian Consumer Council advisor is interesting. I agree with his assertion that Apple has a responsibility to offer a "consumer-friendly product," but I think the case is overstated a bit.

What I think the Europeans probably aren't appreciating is the degree to which the record companies control the music industry, and any industry which touches on the music industry. Apple went toe-to-toe with them and won on the tiered pricing issue, but it's silly to think that Apple can snap their fingers and force the recording industry to abandon DRM, which they see as a key to financial success.

I do think the record companies will have to buckle at some point because consumers are starting to see the slippery slope from Apple's reasonable DRM to the the more pernicious flavors of DRM that are surely in their accountants' wet dreams. I just think it's a bit simplistic to think Apple has enough power to make this happen overnight.

Apple really should do more to fight the record companies on DRM, and I'm sure they aren't doing so because it's lucrative right now for them to play on both sides of the fence. But ITMS is about as open as you can expect for big-label content. If a year or two passes and ITMS looks the same or worse than it does now, you can probably point the finger at Apple for being complicit in the DRM conspiracy. But for now, I see them as "our man on the inside," playing ball with the record companies because they have to, but slowly gaining enough power to hopefully break the stranglehold.

And, right on cue, the RIAA complains that CDs are too cheap:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/07/011217&from=rss

Their ridiculous math (adjusting the *1983* CD price for inflation) tells you all you need to know about how these fuckers play ball. Apple is definitely not the bad actor in this equation.

By the RIAA's logic, a bare-bones cell phone should cost $6000, since they cost $3000 when they first came out.

This is hilarious.

This seems to imply that Job's move now may be motivated by the iPhone.

Oh well, that's why I have CDBaby and other indie CD vendors. Inexpensive CDs, no DRM, quality music, minimal major industry involvement. People are getting wise to the disposable music of the 2000's. Let's hope Apple doesn't gain too much power to become evil. And what about Vista's DRM long term stranglehold plan? I'd better read that thread to find out.

And Jobs uses some fuzzy math to dillute the impact of DRM music. Dividing the total number of purchased ITMS songs by the total iPods ever sold does not produce an accurate average of "22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold." He's double, tripple, quadruple counting iPods which are long since dead and/or replaced by newer and newer models.

Maybe their same "research" which tells us how "the average iPod is nearly full" could tell us how many iPods are really in service and using ITMS songs. I call shenanigans.

Okay, let's assume that one-fifth of iPods are still active. That would bring us up to about 100 songs per iPod. That's about 500MB worth of music. Even the first generation iPod had 5GB of storage. Jobs (and I) could be wrong about the disk utilization of the iPods, but I doubt that it's even as low as 10%, much less the 2% that today's low-end capacity models would make it.

This is a rather timely message from him considering Vista was just released. Vista with all of its DRM. Maybe he wants to make the DRM look unnessesary if he can get it undermined. No need for DRM, then maybe Vista is less appealing? Just a thought.

Vista doesn't need any DRM backlash to make it less appealing. I've yet to see any compelling feature that would make me want to replace an existing XP installation with it. 95 to 2K was an upgrade. Xp added a bit of polish to 2K and Vista seems to add a bit more polish. This many years to get this far? Oh boy, what a waste. I know MS, Nvidia and ATI engineers were analyzing and picking apart every feature of Mac OS X to flesh out the plans for Vista for quite a while, but they should have released something minor a few years ago and just kept building on that. As it stands they seem to do 1 or 2 minor service packs and that's about it.