I skimmed up to this point, whereupon the fuzziness and innumeracy just got to be too much for me. I'll give it another shot when I get home.

Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Jobbie knows that the record industry won't give up DRM for a long time yet so he can say this, make himself look like the good guy but still get his own way - which is a lock-in to iTunes and iPod.

I think it's going to take a long time for the record labels to realise that people want the same things from digital music that they get from CDs. The realisation that DRMd music is a bad deal is slowly filtering through to consumers and that message can only get louder and clearer as the years pass, as devices become obsolete, as shops close, as consumers wish to change content provider.

In my opinion DRM-free digital music has to happen but it won't happen before the financial woes hit one of the big four labels. While they remain reasonably successful then DRM-free is in their eyes too risky. Once one label dives in I believe it will prove to be a successful move and then the rest will follow.

I once read that penguins love to go for a swim but they never want to be the first to dive in, because the first that dives is usually the first to get eaten. Because of this they will apparently try to push each other in. Maybe the record labels are sitting on the edge of the nice keen to see someone else test the waters first.

The Economist:

Mr Jobs’s argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.

dodgygeezer is right - DRM is a looooong way from disappearing. Daring Fireball article on the subject.

Dodgy is correct. Apple has no interest at this time in getting rid of DRM, or at least their DRM. If this was really something they wanted, they could have done so already with those artists and labels that have requested that ITunes sell their music without the FairPlay crap tacked on. This is a ploy; on one hand, it is probably aimed at those making decisions about ITunes in the EU bureaucracy, trying to curry favor with them. It is also aimed at all those Apple fanboys, reinforcing their erroneous belief that Apple is a "good" company.

Of course, I could be wrong.

"envelopes" is not a verb.

a first-hand example of stupid drm schemes:

itunes carries several albums on the planet mu label, as does bleep.com. about a year ago i bought the then-new album by venetian snares, "meathole," from the itunes music store, and for $9 i ended up with protected, highly compressed aac files. come to find out a couple of days later, for an extra handful of change i could have purchased alt-preset insane (320kbps, lame-encoded) drm-free mp3s...

obviously aaron funk doesn't mind his stuff sold drm-free. if itunes were smart they'd remove drm from everyone, including vsnares, immediately.

I can't weigh in on how soon DRM will be gone, BUT I bet a lot of non-existent cash that once one major label cracks they all follow suit very fast. I will not buy DRM music, even if that means I'm stuck with buying the CD and ripping it. But, I am willing to pay itunes prices for music without the DRM even though they are way overpriced comparatively to CDs.

The rotten implications of DRM aside, I would be willing to pay higher prices if it meant the songs I was purchasing were of high enough quality to sound good in a quiet, well designed listening environment and be lossless between formats. But that's not the case. They're like unleavened bread: pretty flat.

I think itunes and the Apple music store are lowering listener expectations about sound quality. That's really unfortunate for audiphiles. MP3 sucks as an audio format, and listening to them through a good sound system is a lot like listening to a dusty LP, at least to my ears.

Yeah - I'm not by any stretch an audiophile but, while music in mp3 format seems fine for general listening (at low to just-short-of-loud volumes), it is by no means good enough if you want to really listen to music or if you want to hear it loud and clear.

"Jobbie knows that the record industry won't give up DRM for a long time yet so he can say this, make himself look like the good guy but still get his own way - which is a lock-in to iTunes and iPod."
And right on cue...

If labels drop DRM, would this mean emusic could start carrying them?

In theory yes, but then you're opening up another can of worms: pricing structure.

The record labels have made it very clear that they think iTunes pricing model is too cheap. Compared to eMusic, iTunes is appalling value for money.

I would guess that they'd want to go it alone since the technology would be much simpler without a requirment for DRM. Then they can set their own pricing models and do what the hell they like. But at least they'd then be back to being competition with each other rather than with their consumers*.

* umm, so long as their pricing wasn't completely ridiculous. if the cost is prohibitively high then they might as well not bother

The reason this statement got made now is that the Norwegian government is trying to throw the iTMS out of the country on anti-trust grounds. Jobs is pointing out, to Norway and others, the reasons why iTMS exists either on these grounds or not at all.

Apple is a tech company that consistently gets it right; they built FairPlay under the assumption that it'd be broken frequently, and built in ways to update and work around such breaches.

If the labels suddenly had a change of heart and said "ok, sell the music without DRM," the iTMS wouldn't drop dead; it'd just be the leader of a much more level playing field. I don't believe this would upset Apple too much; Jobs knows quite well that most people who buy from the iTMS do so for reasons other than the unavailability of free illegal downloads.