Steve Jobs has now said what all of us knew a long time ago. DRM is never going to work. And while I've always been a fan of Liquid Audio's watermarking way back since Webnoise 99, I never supported copy protection. Thus sayeth Jobs:
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
Now the record companies have to wake up to the reality of five years of empirical proof of digital music distribution, now strikingly illustrated by iTunes and face the facts brought to light by Steve Jobs. Furthermore Jobs has to face the facts about the limits that iPod only syncing has provided to limit the ubiquity of iTunes and vice-versa.
The bottom line is that DRM is a royal pain for consumers, especially given the weakness of hard disk technology as a medium for storing digital music. We love songs for decades. Hard drives work for 2 years. We have to keep moving our music all the time and any veteran will tell you that the best way to keep it is on a laser medium. Until the GDrive is reality, this will continue to be a problem.
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