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Music Execs Say Apple's DRM Hurting Industry
EMB Numbers writes "C-Net says last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue. Some executives at this week's Digital Music Forum East conference lashed out at Jobs, blaming Apple and its CEO for their troubles. The impression at the conference was that Jobs' call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was anything but sincere. As the article puts it, 'Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM ... and "it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace — the other service providers, the labels, the users — a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.""
>So in some respects I agree that Apple definitely encourages people to use
> its products and the "ecosystems" that go along with them (iLife, iTunes
> Store, and so on),
In some respects?
No company does the lock thing as well as Mac.
Anyone like you who can claim to know exactly what Jobs thinks of DRM is full of crap. The art of marketing at which Apple excells is all about bullshit.
I DONT know Jobs' true beliefs either so I use OTHER things about his and his corpotation's behavior to make my opinion unlike fanbois who see the usual posturing as some holy revelation.
And after twenty-some years, Apple is still selling computers with single-button mice. Even its high-end professional laptops. Face it; for better or worse, when Apple decides some part of the 'user experience' needs to be consistent, they become fanatical about consistency. I would argue for worse in many cases, but I do admire their resolve.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
And, as usual, Apple fanbois on Slashdot are eating it up. Jobs said get rid of DRM because he knows the industry will never do it. Apple then can claim they tried to open the iPod, but the industry would not let them. Meanwhile, Apple fanbois are asking for seconds.
If you really think Jobs doesn't love his DRM so much, why does Apple refuse to license it to anyone else?
It's called a vertical monopoly. They didn't have it before, but they've nearly got it now. Presuming his anti-DRM stance isn't complete and utter bullshit lip service, removing DRM hurts iTunes' competitors more than it hurts iTunes.
1. m4a's wont run in linux with drm
2. if you reformat your computer after 3 times, apple thinks you ran it on 3 computers
That be nice if they ATLEAST made it like activating windows xp, where its activated based on the hardware and not whats on the hard drive.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs always have gay sex together and hate linux (yes I know about mac osx)