Yesterday Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs published his “Thoughts on Music” in which he calls for a DRM-free digital music future. Welcome to the club, Steve. It’s about time.
Steve’s conversion to the no-DRM-is-better belief comes from a position of strength. During the last years Apple has become the undisputed leader in digital music distribution. And, as we all know, Apple makes money with selling offline mobile music players rather than songs.
This means that it does not make any financial difference for Apple if the songs have DRM or not. But it makes a huge difference for consumers because consumers don’t need DRM. Consumers want music to be OPEN. They want unlimited digital rights. To enjoy their unlimited digital rights they need an open digital music system where they are not locked into any end-to-end solution or specific playback hardware.
Let’s face the facts: According to Steve Jobs, the majors sell 20 billion songs per year DRM-free on CDs. Compared to this number the 2 billion DRM-protected songs Apple sold through its iTunes Store since its inception in 2003 seem to be almost negligible when it comes to their contribution to hold off music piracy.
Jobs points out that the 4 majors - Universal Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner Music - control 70% of the music market licenses. So it’s up to them to decide if their digital music is to be sold with or without DRM. Many indies, (smaller) independent record labels, have already taken the decision in favour of DRM-free music a long time ago. Just take a look at the successful DRM-free music shop finetunes. In fact, many other distributors offer DRM-free music, too.
So, here’s my idea to help the no-DRM-is-better advocates: Let’s organise the biggest online collection of unhappy consumers that privide not only their digital signature but also pre-orders for DRM-free “major music”. Let’s find out how big the untapped market for DRM-free major music really is. If it is big, it will be convincing. I guess it is very big because buying DRM-free music over the Internet is very convenient. And consumers pay a lot for being able to enjoy convenience.
Note: This article is available with links on the mobiliser blog.
