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Steve Jobs' DRM Memo

If you haven't read Steve Jobs memo, "Thoughts on Music", please do.

Also, I've written about DRM here...

All of what Jobs says is absolutely true, in my book. I thought his most salient point is that the majority of users out there are not purchasing their music online. Why would they? If they do, then they're locked into a particular device. They'll also find that bringing that music along with them to new PC's and new devices is difficult and riddled with problems. It's so much easier to simply buy the CD and rip it, DRM-free.

I suppose the music industry is afraid that removing DRM will result in an increase of pirated music. They may be correct on that count, but I'm not sure how much exactly it would increase. As Jobs mentioned, the majority of music purchased is in CD format without DRM. More likely the music labels will see a tremendous surge of online purchases from the likes of iTunes and other music services. Why would that be? Read on.

Today, I buy all of my music on CD's and then rip that music to my PC. Beautiful thing because I never fear that DRM will cause problems when I choose a new device or new computer to copy those files too. However, I know I would be purchasing more music than I am now simply because of the "impulse buy" concept. So often I'm browsing iTunes and would love to click and purchase an album, but I don't. I refuse to because of DRM. Sure, I can easily browse over to Amazon and make the purchase there, but I often don't. I put it off for another day.

The music industry must realize this. I suspect they will move in this direction over the next 3-5 years. All it's going to take is one of the big music labels to make the shift away from DRM and the rest will follow.

It's important to note that removing DRM from the scenario doesn't make it OK for sites like Napster to start popping up again. The music will still be licensed. It will still be illegal to give away licensed music online.

As Jobs said, 70% of the music purchased is in CD format already, which has no DRM at all. This is all kind of silly and I believe the online music industry has been frozen in time now for the past 5 years. Let's hope it changes.

Tags DRM DRM is Crap iTunes Music

posted by John Walker @ 2/6/2007 11:17:00 PM

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Steve Jobs' DRM Memo

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