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Jobs Favors DRM-Free Music Distribution
Another anonymous reader tips an essay by Steve Jobs on the Apple site about DRM, iTunes, and the iPod. Perhaps it was prompted by the uncomfortable pressure the EU has been putting on Apple to open up the iPod. Jobs places the blame for the existence and continuing reliance on DRM squarely on the music companies. Quoting: "Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly."
finally, somebody in the business had a shot of insight.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
With public relation statements like this coupled with the DRM 'ed iTunes how can Steve and Apple lose?
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I actually read the complete commentary by Steve Jobs.
He is dead on.
The music industry (RIAA and their cohorts in crime) have completely botched the distribution of music in an internet-enabled world.
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Say what you will of Steve Jobs, he whole-heartedly believes in Apple's products, and in their ability to compete on a level playing-field. How many other companies, owning the sort of market-share that Apple has in digital music, would even countenance changing it ?
And, he's not insane - Apple make their money on hardware, not so much on the iTMS itself - the risk is relatively low for Apple, conversely so for the labels. It is in fact likely to give SJ *more* power in his dealings with the record labels - Apple are the entrenched brand, the shining beacon over the dark landscape of pirated music . Once DRM is gone, the labels will need Apple to be even more on-side than they do currently, because they'll have lost the small measure of control they currently have.
As far as Apple is concerned, it's a win-win. Steve probably expects to lose sales on the iTMS, but that non-DRM'd files would become more-commonly shared, raising the number of people who want a DAP, and given the public's current opinion on which DAP is the best, he feels confident Apple will benefit overall. Still takes some cojones to suggest it, though... A bit like when they cancelled their best-selling iPod model (the original mini) because they had a better version. A traditional business would have milked the mini for all they could, first.
I think the whole RDF is simply that Steve *really* *really* believes in his companies products, that belief shines through in his body language, his tone of voice, his whole attitude. People pick up on that and empathise with it. It's a great sales technique, but it needs products that really change the world to do it. Apple strives to make that sort of product.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
What is amazing to me is that Jobs/Apple have a near monopoly on digital music downloads/players that would only be hurt by a lack of DRM lock-in and yet Jobs is still advocating for the change. Would any other company or CEO do this?
Most iPods are still filled primarily with P2P downloads and ripped CDs. The lock-in they have is not all that valuable and probably not worth the bad press they receive as a result of it. I have long said the ITMS and Fairplay were just there to sell iPods not make money and the Fairplay was the least intrusive DRM they could get the studios to buy in on. Jobs stated long ago that DRM does not work for stopping piracy. He knows the score. DRM exists to promote incompatibility such that the media companies can get people to buy the same music for different uses (ring tone, in the car, portable, home stereo, etc.)
Apple saw this use coming an stepped in to make sure the Mac line of computers was not destroyed by it once Microsoft controlled DRM using their OS monopoly. The fact that they succeeded as well as they have is somewhat miraculous and I suspect surprised even them. They set out to stop macs from being third class media citizens and ended up the big kid in the portable player market. Don't get too excited though. Windows Media Format - PlaysForSure is still the most common DRM scheme in use since so many people accidentally rip their CDs to that format with WMP's default settings. Now Apple is being attacked through legal channels and several companies have a vested interest in making sure Fairplay is defanged, while PlaysForSure and the Zune DRM formats are not. Jobs is doing the right thing here by turning their press attacks against them and asking for no DRM, rather than a situation that will inevitably lead to MS owning the space.
It's called the goverment. It makes laws and can fight companies for you. People control it in most places.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
An Apple lawyer has already said that Apple wouldn't ditch DRM for iTunes even if the labels stopped demanding it.
Because everyone knows that unnamed lawyers quoted in Slashdot postings know a lot more about a company's internal strategy than the CEO quoted on his own damn website.
Or just plain old Steve Jobs RDF, but it's by far the most candid piece of "straight talk" I've ever heard from the CEO of a huge company like Apple. Well done, Steve-O, if that little piece doesn't sell an extra 10 million ipods, then I don't know what will.
Apple will blame anyone but themselves and try to spin it so that they don't look bad.
Apple's CEO just said that they will make all the music they sell DRM-free if the labels allow them to. Where is the spin here?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Microsoft releases an OS that won't run software that ran on it's own earlier operating system, and also tends to corrupt a music device which is in competition with their own music device and it's Apple's fault? Microsoft has pushed multiple DRM setups and then stopped supporting it's own damn standards but Apple is the bad guy?
I don't buy any drm'd music, but Apple's is surely the least abusive...It allows you to burn it to a cd, which can then be ripped back into an un-drm'd format...Pretty obvious that they did the minimum amount of work that would satisfy record companies that were so damn drm obsessed that they were shipping cd's with a free rootkit included.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Okay, poor choice of words. I just meant that they refuse to license it for use in other playback devices.
And why should they? Steve Jobs is obviously a smart guy; things he's said and written elsewhere make me think that he understands the inherent problems behind DRM.
In short, DRM doesn't work. It works, sort of, only by keeping the mechanisms out of sight, and changing them all the time, as people catch on and figure out what's going on "behind the curtain."
The more people you let see behind the curtain, the harder it is to make work, and keep working, even in the shoddy way that it does currently. Licensing means that specifications and technical documents need to be written, and such documents can be leaked (and are far more likely to be leaked when they're being sent to some licensee in Europe, than kept within a particular technical working group inside Apple US). So if Apple licensed out FairPlay, it would mean that FairPlay would get broken more often, and they would have to dedicate more effort to fixing it, and those fixes would be harder to roll-out, because there would be more users, and multiple online music stores, run by various licensees who might take their responsibilities for updates more or less seriously, etc. etc.
DRM isn't a single technology that you can sell. It's not a word processor. It really is defective by design; that's not just some dumb slogan -- that is reality. Anyone who buys a DRM system, thinking that it's a product they can just use, and then forget about, is a fool. A DRM system is an arms race. It can only work when you're committed to throwing a lot of programmers behind it; programmers who are constantly shoring it up, as people pull the bricks down from the outside. And the work that it takes to sustain is directly proportionate to the number of people who are working to crack it.
Licensing out FairPlay would be a losing proposition for Apple on all fronts. It would force them to lose revenue from the iTMS, which isn't exactly a huge profit center anyway -- as others have pointed out, Apple makes a lot more money on an iPod than they do on the average user's iTMS purchases. Plus, it would mean that they would have to spend a lot more effort constantly fixing FairPlay, and it would create a huge logistical problem -- how do you roll out those fixes to users who may be using some licensee's music store? If Apple doesn't keep FairPlay's facade of security up, the music labels will use it as a bargaining point in negotiations, but they'll be dependent on their licensees, who they don't have total control over, in order to maintain that facade. It's a lose-lose for Apple.
Personally, I don't think Apple will ever license FairPlay. I think they'll pull all DRMed music from the European market, and close the iTMS there, before they'd open the can of worms that licensing would entail. Exactly what would happen at that point is anybody's guess, but there are a whole lot of iPod-owning Europeans who probably want some type of online music store, and Apple is pretty good at PR. They might be able to turn it into some sort of a victory against the governments mandating the interoperability, or against the music labels who won't sell DRM-free music. Or it might backfire horribly and cause a lot of people to run out and buy non-iPod MP3 players in order to use competing online stores (though I doubt it; I don't think that the presence or absence of an online store is a huge selling point of most music players, except those linked to subscription services like Napster).
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Apple does not have a monopoly on digital music players. From Wikipedia:
In economics, a monopoly (from the Latin word monopolium - Greek language monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods.
Apple is not the only provider of digital music players. There is no lack of competition in the marketplace for digital music players. Apple has the majority of the market because more people want to own iPods than any other music player. There is no conspiracy and no monopoly.
I personally don't think removing DRM would have any effect on iPod sales, as most people I know have bought little to no music from the iTMS. I think I've bought four albums from them.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
It's obviously an all-or-nothing deal. He wants a consistent user experience so that the customer knows what he's getting every time. Microsoft caught shit for pimping the Zune's squirting and then turning around and selling tracks that certain artists didn't want to be squirted. That kind of inconsistency adds complexity. The iTunes store is supposed to be simple. There's no conspiracy here. On average, barely 3% of the music on an iPod is from the iTunes store, so if a customer really wants to move to another player, he's not going to feel "locked in" by 3% of his music collection. If you'd read the damn essay, you'd know that.
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Steve Jobs is Disney's biggest shareholder. I wonder if he would also favour DRM-free movies...
So, one interesting thing about DRM is that it enables a particular business model that is completely unfeasible without DRM. Here's a hint: it's not the iTMS model.
The Zune store, and any other subscription business model requires DRM. You can buy DRM-free tracks. It's impossible to rent them.
Perhaps this is why iTMS hasn't offered a subscription option.
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Do not forget that OS X is tied to Mac hardware by a "Trusted Computing Module".
It isn't now, nor has it ever been. Most if not all current Macs don't even have a TPM. Earlier models that did didn't use the TPM in any way. Where the hell do you get your information?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
This a holding me back at buying music. They are loosing money, while the music I do buy, will be counted in as "DRM free" and will help the 97% to get even bigger.
I would just love it, if they would remove DRM for good. I would probably go from $ 10-20 to $ 100-200 a month, if I could have the ease and speed of downloading it. (this last line was just added to remind the "big four" about what they are missing out on...
Bah.. having read the article myself, I think a better summary would be, Nate Anderson lists some reasons why Apple benefits from DRM, and uses an unnecessarily controversial title as a hook to draw reader attention.
Here's a tip: Nate isn't an official Apple spokesperson. His views and opinions are his own, and have about as much bearing on Apple's strategic goals as yours or mine do. Now, if you can point me to an article that has a single verifiable quote from someone who oficially speaks for Apple saying, "hey, we're right behind DRM," then you might have a point. Otherwise, the best legitimate summary you can get is, "Nate thinks Apple likes DRM."
If you want to see DRM's best friends, look at the RIAA and MPAA. They're the ones who continue to spend tons of money lobbying Congress for laws that would make hardware DRM mandatory in any device that touches any device that could ever potentially touch content. They're the ones who've spent tons of money on markting campaigns that say, "you wouldn't commit genocide against an entire, harmless, sentient species, so why would you consider letting another person watch a rented movie on your HDTV screen without paying us theatre royalties?"
Or perhaps look at the DRM that Microsoft has rolled into Vista. Show me how Apple has loaded its flagship products with restrictions that turn them into crippleware as soon as one sees anything that looks like protected content.
Hell, if you want an opinion piece, try this one: How Apple Could End Up Being DRM's Worst Enemy:
The labels wanted to use DRM to control the consumer's access to content. They'd be happy to legislate away fair use and sell it back to us, impose bullshit like tiered pricing for anything that actually sells, and screw hardware vendors for the infamous $1-per-Zune "because we all know your customers are criminals" fee.
But they can't, because Apple doesn't like those ideas. And the labels famously failed to strong-arm Apple at the last contract negotiation because they need Apple more than Apple needs them. The iPod is the dominant product in the market, and the only way to sell DRM'd content for the iPod is through Apple.
In short, Apple is using DRM to screw the labels harder than the labels have been able to screw the consumer. And the labels are getting so tired of being screwed by Apple. They're so tired, in fact, that they're starting to look at dropping the DRM just to take some of the edge off Apple's market dominance.
Let's be clear here, boys and girls: if the labels do away with DRM, it won't be because they've spontaneously turned into "information wants to be free" idealists. They'll do it because it's hurting their bottom line. And who's the company that's used DRM to hurt the labels's bottom line rather than using DRM to help the labels screw consumers? Apple.
All the ethical rants, consumer hostility, and technological circumvention to date have failed to make the labels back away from DRM. They've only entrenched the labels more firmly in the idea that they need legal control over everything up to and including the consumer's eyes and ears.
If the labels decide to drop DRM, it will be because of how Apple used DRM to screw the labels out of money. Period.
Show me a more effective enemy than that.
Gates comments was about the current DRM and the need for better DRM, Jobs is about getting rid of DRM.
But I can see how someone like you wouldn't be able to figure that out...
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Don't you even remember those days? If it was all about lock-in to the music store, why did Apple start with the "Rip, Mix, Burn" iTunes ads? Don't you remember how Apple was a major target of the RIAA and labels for that campaign? Jobs was demonised for encouraging music piracy - and it was reported in many places as if Apple was the new Napster for encouraging people to "rip" their CDs. Under the pressure, they added "please don't steal music" stickers to the iPod. Other companies would probably simply have removed the ability to rip CDS from their product - or put DRM on the ripped files like Microsoft is wont to do.
You whiners should remove your heads from your asses. Without Jobs, we wouldn't have any high-profile people with the power to influence DRM and the labels in a positive way. We'd still be in the dark ages, with the labels denying it was even possible to make money selling music online, and your only choices would be CDs or bittorrent. Now Apple is in a position to fight for the repeal of DRM on music altogether. But you just want to undermine it. Fucking idiots! You whine all the time about how DRM is evil - then someone comes along with the capacity to get rid of some of it, and you just diss him? You don;t even know what's good for you.
Seriously, which tactic is going to work - whining all the time and running lame "defective by design" campaigns with the FSF - or having an ally who is successful and influential, with contacts within the actual record labels? Someone who actually makes the labels money and has revolutionized their business? Yeah, I'm sure they are going to listen to some FSF protestor who says he won't buy music online anyway, over someone who makes them millions of dollars.
... and then they built the supercollider.
And I'm sure Jobs would LOVE to move those programmers to work on another project. Devoting a good chunk of his staff simply to appease the record companies, when they could be working on products that actually make profit, isn't exactly the best use of employee time.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
"I'd like to meet these "expert" listeners."
l es/index.php).
Boo.
AAC at 128 kbit is good enough for me. I certainly cannot hear any artefacts on my system (Sennheiser HD-600 connected to a Denon DA convertor and AHA headphone amp).
With MP3, you certainly can hear some artefacts, an aquarium-like effect in the higher regions. But this seems to be not the case for AAC.
With respect to your comments on "transience", "Timbre" and stuff, show me some measurements. Show me some real stuff, not some huggy-feely analysis, be more like the people at Audioholics (http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audioprincip
Please point out the differences in balance in a frequency spectrum that might be perceived by the human ear, then I'll be happy to agree with you.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.