Rou

It's not often I say this. I agree with Steve Jobs. The Apple Führer recently spoke out against the music industry. Sorta. Specifically he targeted the Digital Rights (restrictions) Management requirements that the RIAA has forced onto Apple's iTunes store.

In a article posted on Apple's web site, he makes a couple of good points. Ones that the rest of the internet world has made time and again. Hopefully, he has a little more weight to throw around.

He forecasts three possible futures for digital music. The first is what we have now: online music can only be played on the purchasers mp3 players, but pirated and homemade music can play on any of them. The second is Apple licensing it's FairPlay DRM to competitors so they can interoperate between players, giving users more options. The downside is that it increases the exposure of the DRM as more people have access to the encryption process. The third option is to get rid of DRM entirely because it just doesn't work.

He advocates the third option. He claims that of the 22 billion songs sold last year, the record companies sold 20 billion of them on DRM-free CD. The remaining 2 billion songs were sold online with some for of DRM. As long as that model is true, piracy is not even slowed down by attempts to restrict music with annoying DRM exclusivity.

Think about it. It takes about a minute to find, purchase and download a song from iTunes. Give or take. It takes about the same time to do the same on a peer to peer network. Call it 10 minutes to grab a full album off bit torrent or p2p. The difference is that once you get music from iTunes, you have to spend additional time altering the file to get the music into an mp3 or AAC format to use anywhere you want. The pirated version came that way. Sure, it's unethical, but it's true. How much is that time worth to you? If you've got the right player, nothing. If you don't, maybe it's worth more than $.99? Justification of course, but foolish record companies (I know, I repeat myself there) need to consider that many of the pirates out there follow that exact line of thought when it comes to online sales.

DRM is bad. Has always been bad. Will always be bad. And it hurts your sales more than it protects them. I could understand it if it worked. But it doesn't. The proof is the fact that p2p networks still have every song you could ever want after years of DRM sales. They have to come from somewhere, right? But I know the RIAA doesn't like to be introspective and notice the flaws in their thought process. Their itty bitty brains might explode if they ever caught on to the fact that anyone with a linux box and a MP3 ripper can buy a CD and offer it up to the world, eh? Can't even install illegal rootkits that way, can ya Sony?

Your model sucks. You need to rethink it. And given how low the world opinion is of your organization, you might want to consider Mr Job's proposal here. I think he's right. And if you had a brain, you would too.