apple’s steve jobs - thoughts on music
Today, Apple’s Steve Jobs posted an essay on Apple.com called Thoughts On Music. A title that suggests something that it is not; it should have been titled Thoughts On DRM but I suppose that’s less sexy. It’s an interesting essay in that Steve Jobs openly admits that there’s trouble in Curpetino. Not in a grand sense but in a pervasive way none the less; he’s saying that encoding MP3 files with DRM (Digital Rights Management) is not working.
Of course anyone who has purchased music files from a company that uses DRM would just say “well, duh!” but the problem isn’t the music distributors it’s the content owners, mainly the big four - Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI - they demand the protection. Yet as Jobs points out, in 2006 20 billion songs were sold by these companies without DRM protection - on CDs! This could be the start of a long, drawn out battle..
February 6th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
ok steve,
if you are serious about losing drm then why not only employ it only on music where its required by the record label?
maybe then you can make some fancy charts and graphs showing sales performance gains by dropping the drm trappings?
let me know how that works out,
thanks,
josh
February 6th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
indeed, very good point Josh…..
February 7th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Back about 4 or 5 years ago, right before the I-pod, companies were trying to capitalize on that DRM protection even down to putting watermarks on the actual file so that in the event that the song is broadcast over the airwaves, strategically placed receivers would pick up the performance of that song. It was a way for copyright owners to hold their respective Performing Rights Organizations accountable in the event that they were not paid for performances on the radio. Pretty ridiculous, but it sounded cool at the time. I wonder if that company is still around…?
February 7th, 2007 at 8:02 am
DRM=smoke and mirrors anyway. How many non-Madonna/Justin Timberlake/Depeche Mode-scale artists got paid last year from BMI for radio airplay? I know Gang Of Four’s Return The Gift got decent college radio airplay…did they get BMI from that? Mayyyybe??? But what about a smaller group like Gang Gang Dance or even Scritti Politti who had a revival last year on some college stations?
Attention Apple–who cares about mp3 sharing when the bands can’t even get the money they are SUPPOSED to be getting!!!!
Of course, I COULD BE WRONG….somebody gimme the light of day on this one. I will gladly stand corrected, but I bet I’m not in error here :-)
February 7th, 2007 at 8:28 am
there has been a BMI/Ascap debate here before and I have to say that I’m not sure whether college radio pays out or is exempt. Anyway, that’s not the debate here - the point is that as Jobs says the labels themselves released thousands of CDs last year that are not protected and play in any type of CD player.. And they can easily be ripped and shared over the internet and burned to CD-R to be given to friends. He sees this, as do I, as a double standard - in his own words “imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music….in such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which playable on all players..” The idea behind this is that he’s saying give the customers what they want. He knows the customer is always right….
February 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am
by the way, our new download store offers up 256kbs files without DRM….
February 7th, 2007 at 8:57 am
the europeans are reacting as Jobs fingered them in his essay -
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Norway_Apple_iTunes.html
February 7th, 2007 at 9:00 am
and Forbes thinks Jobs is merely trying to appease the europeans so that Apple can reap the rewards of that large market for downloads…
February 7th, 2007 at 9:00 am
forbes link http://www.forbes.com/business/businesstech/2007/02/06/jobs-apple-drm-tech-media-cx_lh_0206jobs.html
February 7th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I have seen the non-majumberlakemodes make some residuals and we can go into that at another time. The success in this whole music selling thing is going to be in the best distribution model. With billions of units sold whether individual songs or entire albums, we need to realize that we have opened the flood gates for every musician to take a bite out of the whole pie. The digital world has made it easier to do everything, create, distribute, reproduce etc., and when we attempt to complicate this system with alarms, whistles and shit we upset the usability of the end product. Who are these companies really helping here, the consumer or the content owners/musicians? I would have to say that Apple’s goal would be to take care of its consumers first and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
It’s funny…to me the consumer issue and the artist “survivability” issue are basically two sides of the same coin. If the band can’t get paid, it theoretically shuts down at least part of the ability to create the music in the first place, making DRM moot.
Apple’s seeing the light on DRM because of the way people consume music–they don’t want to be limited because of proprietary issues, they just want to listen to the tunes.
The reason people still pay for music is, in my mind, connected to what Frank Zappa called “fetishment and fondlement”. People want to hold what they buy in their hands. One of the most brilliant-yet-overlooked-by-some notions is the idea of downloading the album art along with the music. The portable MP3 player gives the user a way to tangibly “hold” what they have purchased on download. The ability to look at the album art (on that tiny little screen, feh) is another step towards the Zappa notion.
I think people inherently place value on purchased items above what is gotten “for free”. People consume free music, but in some cases I think the idea of “free” is a primer to buy. “If THIS stuff is FREE, and I LIKE it, the stuff this band is CHARGING for must be even better!”
It’s a bizarre way of thinking, but I think it’s human nature…which is why free music WORKS, in my mind. DRM basically circumvents a kind of viral publicity made popular by file-sharing. IMHO.