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The Economist, DVD Jon On Apple's DRM Stand
We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right." Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music." Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.
get rid of DRM. maybe others will follow...
I have worked on my church's podcasts and know that podcasts on iTunes can be DRM-free. Maybe the rules for music are different on the iT(M)S. Then again, individuals can submit pocasts but my indie band friend had to submit her albums through an intermediary.
"It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Yeah, right. Tell that to the vast majority of non-tech savvy iTunes users, who don't understand why they can't make an MP3 CD of their purchased music. I have a friend who likes to make "Mix" CD's for other friends, and they keep getting frustrated when iTunes tells them some of their tracks can't be converted to MP3. I've tried explaining DRM to them, but for the typical layperson, it goes right over their heads.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Getting distribution on iTunes is not as hard as was suggested.
/ viewAlbum?playListId=202470955
If you produce a CD and follow the instructions to have your disc sold on CDBaby.com, they will submit your music to iTunes. In the case of music I've submitted, there was a delay of about six weeks; then we got word that we were live on iTunes.
This is not the full ticket to Hollywood. It's not a huge hurdle either. It's one of many small cumulative things that you do to get your music out there.
Notably there was no contractual lock-in with CDBaby or with iTunes. They own nothing, we retain our copyrights and our ability to distribute in any other channel we like. The whole thing has been artist-friendly.
Our R&B artist on iTunes:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa
Our other music (ambient & progressive rock) http://www.workshopmusic.com/streams.html
See, but that would only be a major concern if the iPod wasn't the most popular DAP already. The iPod can now survive without the iTMS because there's just so much built around it, from the "coolness factor" to the fact that about half of all DAP peripherals use the iPod dock. And iPods are still the easiest to use with iTunes, especially since you get niceties like lyrics and album art transferred over as well. DRM certainly helped Apple get where it is, but it doesn't need it to stay there.
Okay, but on the other hand, not all owned songs are used in iPods (or used) at all, either. Personally, I've got a couple gigs of music that I don't really listen to, and aren't on my iPod. For example, I have the soundtracks of some video games, which are great when I'm in the mood (read: free time), but generally I listen to my iPod when I'm walking to class. For another example, I've bought one or two CD's for a really good song or two, but I think the rest is terrible. (I'm lookin' at you, Demon Days...)
These numbers also don't take into account people like me.
People that have purchased songs from iTunes and don't own an iPod.
That makes the average number of songs per iPod even lower.
When devising our digital store (www.roughtrade.com), we didn't for one moment consider having DRM catalogue included. Contrary to it being a marketing issue of differentiation against would-be digital competitors, us opting to sell only DRM-free MP3's has been moral stance informed by three decades of selling music. We consider it morally wrong to impose one set of ownership rights (on the same album) to those customers preferring to buy one format and not another - instead, we treat all our customers the same, whatever format they decide to purchase. To do otherwise would be disrespectful to our customers accrued over thirty years. As it currently stands, major labels have ignored our long-standing retail support and that of our customers (arguably the roots of their prosperity) in favour of imposing DRM and thereby propagating an uncompetitive digital retail market, whereby retailers such as ourselves are unfairly discriminated against to the continued advantage of an effective monopoly. For Rough Trade, music is not a content driver, music is a passion shared with like-minded people over a counter or website. The more music retailers that uphold this value, the more prosperous our industry would surely become. The sooner DRM is scrapped by major labels, the sooner we can present our long-established customer base a consistent offer, whether they visit our London stores, buy online at our mail-order website, or download MP3 from our digital store website. The end result being we can compete on a level playing field, allowing music lovers to choose their digital retailer based on 'music lover' factors such as the retailers ability to recommend exciting new music, and not uncompetitive, discriminating terms of format availability.
Apple hates DRM because it's an arms race that sucks up resources. Programmers that could be working on cool code are stuck ensuring that FairPlay doesn't get cracked, and that they get a patch up within the time framed dictated by their contract. Without DRM, the iPod and iTunes codebases could be trimmed to run faster and possibly even allow for the API to be published.
This is almost certainly the case. Jobs, as I recall, had to do a lot of talking to get major labels online with the iTMS. Just being able to put the same song on more than one computer probably took months of begging, threatening and deal-making. I know it's fun to whale on Jobs, but he really is interested in making his customers happy, and I imagine he's fully aware of how annoying the iTMS DRM is for non-technical people.
Me, I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3. Sure there's a quality loss--I bet almost nobody would notice the difference. And using a CD-RW means I'm not even out the $0.10 for a CD-R.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
"Yeah, but they want to sell the songs. Apple could probably make more money by selling you 20-30 DRM-less songs than by selling you an iPod. Maybe it would take 100 songs, I dunno. But using a proprietary store to leverage iPod sales is a losing strategy."
r efer=us&sid=a2Skp1Y.djTA) that means Apple makes $80 off of each iPod sold. Apple would have to sell 1429 songs to equal the profit of one iPod.
It is very public knowledge by now that iTunes operates at barely above break even. Let's take what we know. For every 99 cents song the record label gets 65c. Standard credit card merchant agreements calls for around 20 cents per transaction plus at least 2% of each sale. That leaves Apple at most 12 cents per song on average. Let's even be generous since Apple bundles purchases made over a short period of time to save money and they sell whole albums and say they make 14 cents per song not including marketing, development, and support.
It's also popularly believed that Apple makes about 40% profit margins on average on each iPod sold (search Google). If the average selling price of all iPods is around $200 (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&
It's pretty clear to me that Jobs is just practicing the ancient art of Noshitonmi. He's bouncing the blame off of him and saying that the devil made him do it.
Mafiaa legions already trolling for "examples" already makes them the bad guy. With Europe stacking up on him, Jobs is just assuming the classic Noshitonmi stance to deflect all negative energy towards the Mafiaa.
Quite brilliant, actually.
He better start stretching, though. Those new Noshitonmi poses he's going to need for SEC investigations are gonna require special foo.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Right, but in this case the "extreme" is bounded by zero on the low end, so the extremes on the upper end push actually the average number of songs *higher* than what is the case for the typical iPod owner. The median number of songs would give a better picture of the typical iPod. In this case, the median number of songs is most certainly less than 22, so Jobs point is even stronger.
Think of it this way. Bill Gates walks into a stadium full of people who have no money, and each person is very wealthy according to the average level of wealth. The median person, however, has no money. On a less extreme scale, the average number of songs overstates the extent to which a typical person is locked into iTMS music.
That's a half-good point, and I'm gonna tip my hat (half way) and give you half of a "touche'" for it.
But it still isn't quite the same situation. When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it. A cassette was a cassette was a cassette. Our tapes became obsolete because technology changed, and offered us benefits that convinced us to switch to something newer -- cds gave us track by track access and an order of magnitude better quality -- and for a time the manufacturers all put out stereos that could play your cassettes or cds.
In the case of digital audio, the iTunes DRM songs can only be played in the player(s) produced by a single manufacturer, and are incompatible with any other. There is no fundamental difference in technology between a protected iTunes track and a track encoded with mp3, ogg, or whatever. The issue of whose device you can play it on is the only significant difference between a DRMed track and a non-DRMed one).
In short, your point about cassettes has to do with format lock-in. The issue with Apple's DRM is more about vendor lock in.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
So you dont agree with the whole idea of radio? Live bands at a bar? This is your opinion, and yet you state it as fact. ( i know i know i must be new here...)
You don't care to hear arguments against this? Oh well la dee da! I guess your clearly biased view is the only option then. Im proud to say I listen to all sorts of different music. Without piracy I simply wouldn't have a chance to hear many new bands. Which is better for society as a whole, diversity and openness or profittering and obeidience? You seem to have everything backwards. The industry has stolen from ME and my fellow citizens by repeatidly extending copyright, suing everyone under the sun, breaking fair use, extorting artists and countless other violations of the public good. Personally to the industry I say, you want a war? you got a war!
I may not have a wife or a 30 gig video ipod, but that in no way allows your "morality" to trump mine. Its no use to write anything else anyway because as your yourself said, you clearly don't "get" it.
How does other people selling DRM free tunes let Apple off the hook for saying one thing and doing the opposite.
:).
It doesn't, and I didn't claim it did. The first part of my message addressed that point. I didnt go into more detail because I really think I've already posted more than enough on that topic. The second part (the one you're quoting here) is a response to the claim that Apple is preventing artists and labels from releasing DRM-free music: they could only do that if they were a monopoly.
But since you insist on belaboring the first point, let's go back and address it again, in more detail:
Apple isn't under any obligation to provide every service that you want through the iTunes store.
If they don't provide a service, then there are several possible reasons for it.
With Apple, one of the common reasons for a restriction in one of their products is aesthetic or philosophical: a restriction that's there because it establishes Apple's "brand" or promotes their "style". Removing the user-interface to the customization hooks that that products like Kaleidoscope (in classic Mac OS) and Shapeshifter (in OS X) take advantage of is an example of this kind of restriction. Making the Mac desktop immediately recognisable through the "Aqua" theme and its successors is part of their product branding for Mac OS X.
The other reason is cost. They don't offer some feature of capability because they have decided it would cost more to provide it than it's worth. It seems likely that a generic OS X for arbitrary Intel platforms is one of those things.
It can be difficult in some cases to decide which of these is the real reason, and if you were to argue that Jobs occasionally tells whoppers about which of these two reasons Apple did or failed to do something, I could only agree. For example, Apple has said that they have esthetic objections to a generic OS X. They have said it would weaken the Apple brand. Butthey have also said they would never release a headless low-end Mac ("No ugly monitors on nice Macs", I beleieve, were Jobs' words), and of course their back-and-forth on Intel has always bemused me - I still have my copy of Rhapsody DR1 for generic Intel boxes
In this case - so far as I know - Jobs is not saying anything about this particular point so I'm free to speculate without fear of the Reality Distortion Field taking over my brain.
So...
The people making the argument that Steve Jobs is being hypocritical seem to be assuming that the lack of DRM-free music hosted on the iTunes Music Store is a philosophical restriction. that it reflects some kind of preference for DRM. Now... it's possible that this is the case.
It just doesn't seem likely to me. Steve Jobs has made the same point about DRM in the past, most notably in the 2003 Rolling Stone interview, so this is not a new "tactical" change of heart in response to the events in Europe... his position on DRM is the same now as it was when the iTMS was launched.
So that brings up the question of what the cost to creating a "DRM-free" zone in the iTMS would be.
Apple's business model for the iTunes store is for all music to be sold under identical conditions. Apple has repeatedly said that offering different licenses for different labels or for different classes of music is not on the table, at least in the major markets. So while they don't have an "iTMS Lite" for DRM-free music, they don't have an "iTMS Premium" for the labels to corral their 'hot' content into either.
Now, you may disagree with the importance of this "line in the sand", but the fact that you disagree with their priorities doesn't change the fact that this is one of their priorities. I disagree with a lot of Apple's policies, myself, so I'm not going to try and convince you that this priority is important. For the purposes of this argument, whether you or I agree with it is irrelevant.
The point is that it, by itself, is more than enough explanation for why Apple doesn't set aside a corral within the iTMS proper for non-DRMed content. It may not be, in your opinion, a good reason, but just because you disagree with someone that doesn't imply that you or they are lying. It just means that you disagree.