gregh  2007-04-02 03:27  apple  drm  emi  itunes   

I couldn't sleep, so here I sit listening to the EMI/Apple press conference:

• Come May, the entire EMI library will be available on the iTunes Music Store, as MP3sunencumbered AACs, for $1.29 each.
• iTunes customers will be able to upgrade their current EMI iTunes purchases to the premium MP3s for $0.30 per item.
• Albums in MP3AAC will be sold at the current prices.
• Apple estimates that over half of the DRM-protected tracks on the iTMS will be available unencumbered by the end of the year.
• To accommodate the multiple pricing levels, users will set a preference as to what quality the user wants.
• Existing iTMS library, with DRM-encumbered songs, will remain.

I must've misseddid miss the bitrate of the new encoding. TechCrunch says 256k.

gregh  2007-02-06 11:21  apple  drm  itunes  music   

Written by a man who's clearly confident in the position of his company in the marketplace, Steve Jobs writes about why music is sold with DRMs, and how Apple would embrace a marketplace without DRMs. More importantly, he gives a reasonable explanation for why Apple won't license FairPlay to other device makers, and suggests reasons why Microsoft was forced to go its own way with Zune's DRM.

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.

Read "Thoughts on Music" for the full thing.