I’ll keep this brief, as you’re a busy man.
You recently wrote that you would drop DRM from the iTunes music store “in a heartbeat” if you could.
Well, as you’ll see if you check the iTunes purchase logs, I bought quite a few tunes from the iTunes music store. You’ll notice that I stopped as soon as you fixed the flaw that allowed Hymn to remove the DRM. Since then I’ve bought music from places like bleep.com that sell DRM-free music. I still use the iTunes music store, but only as an easy way to preview tracks that I then buy elsewhere.
Clearly, there are plenty of music labels (such as most indie labels) that are willing to license their music DRM-free. Clearly there are people like me who won’t buy music if it has DRM they can’t remove. So, here’s a proposal:
Allow record companies and artists who elect to do so, to sell their music DRM-free on the iTunes music store. Indicate the DRM status with a small icon in the download views in iTunes, like you indicate explicit lyrics. I’ve put together a quick mock-up. As you can see, the padlock icon is very discreet and unobjectionable. I don’t think it would cause user confusion; the people who don’t care about DRM will probably never notice it.
Once you’ve offered DRM-free music on the iTunes store, you just sit back and watch. If I’m right, the non-DRM music sales will surge. Then you’ll have some real ammo with which to approach the major labels. Because frankly, they don’t listen to consumers like me. I know, because this year I wrote to EMI listing a bunch of CDs I didn’t buy because they had DRM warnings on the packaging. I didn’t even get a reply.
Yours sincerely,
mathew
February 8th, 2007 at 10:20 -0700
can’t you still right-click on songs and select “convert selection to mp3″? i’ve been sending converted things to friends via gmail and AFAIK, they’ve had no problems playing the songs.
February 9th, 2007 at 07:52 -0700
If you do that, the MP4 is decompressed to plain audio, and then recompressed to MP3. The result is a fairly nasty quality loss. It’s not like the iTunes store music is high quality encodings to start with.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:37 -0700
Good points, however Mr. Job’s counters would be that the larger labels would throw a tisy fit if they didn’t try to block Hymn. Apple should start to offer the same DRM-free music that bleep and emusic offer now.
Here’s one to think of. So they bough Apple music name and have yet to offer the Beatles. Do you think they would try to start talking to major artist directly, getting rid of major music labels?