Steve Jobs speaks his mind on DRM

On Tuesday, February 6, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” to the music industry. His words (or whoever wrote it’s words) were carefully thought out and gave him a chance to share “his feelings” while still maintaining his relationships with the industry. In the essay, Jobs examines “three different alternatives for the future.”

The first option is that we “continue on the current course.” In a sense, he almost makes it sound silly how segregated the music industry is with Zune music only playing on the Zune player, Sony Connect only playing on Sony players, and iTunes only play on iPod. He then states that “customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.” Jobs takes a closer look at the iPod and iTunes. He mentions that there have been 90 million iPods sold, and 2 billion songs sold from the iTunes Music Store. That means on average, each iPod user has 22 songs from iTunes. He says since the most popular iPod holds 1,000 songs, that means that only 3% of the music on the players are protected with DRM.

The second option that Steve speaks of is Apple licensing its FairPlay DRM – which he makes pretty clear will never happen. He talks about how history (PlaysForSure) proves that when multiple companies use the same DRM encryption technology, there will be leaks of information, making it easy for people to develop DRM-cracking tools. He points at Microsoft’s decision to move from an open model (PlaysForSure) to a closed model (Zune) as evidence that opening up is the wrong way to go in the future. “Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.”

The third option is to get rid of DRM entirely. And as weird as it sounds, Steve Jobs may actually be sincere about this one. I won’t say much more about this one, since it’s best to read this excerpt:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

All in all, Steve Jobs takes a bold position by writing this essay. He knows that he’s the godfather of the music industry – even though he runs a products company. Judging by his language, and how the piece is written, option 3 is really the only one he feels strongly about. I can’t say how the music industry feels about this, but Jobs does make a good point – the music industry already sells 90% of their music DRM-free – so what’s another 10%?

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music [Apple]