A very interesting article from Podcastingnews.com:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted a surprising statement on the company’s site today, challenging the music industry to abandon DRM (copy protection) on digital music downloads.

Jobs outlines three possible futures for digital music:

• Continue as is it is now, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music.
• Apple could license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores.
• Abolish DRMs entirely - according to Jobs, 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.

Jobs concludes by asking that people concerned with DRM convince the record labels to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free, saying that “Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.”

Jobs’ statement is clearly self-serving; the company has faced criticism and legal battles from several European nations over its monopolization of digital music formats.

Nevertheless, Jobs move demonstrates his intuitive mastery of public relations, redirecting criticism of Apple’s monopolization of digital music to the record labels and their licensing restrictions. [More…]

There are many fascinating aspects to this move - first, Steve Jobs is not only involved in distribution through the iTunes distribution channel, but he is a major stakeholder in content creation (when Disney acquired Pixar, Jobs became a major shareholder in Disney). So, while not in the music business per se, he is heavily invested in both creation and distribution.

Second, I listened to a podcast just this week that discussed that it was in Apple’s best interest to maintain the status quo in DRM. Since Apple benefits from the phenomenal success of iTunes not only from the revenue generated from the sales of songs but primarily from the fact that iTunes is ‘closed source’, it creates a demand for iPods. The DRM then locks people into Apple hardware. If I own a thousand dollars worth of music that is DRM’d in a proprietary and DRM’d format, then there is a huge barrier to leaving for other hardware solutions.

I am not so sure that this is just a publicity sleight of hand, Apple is a major player in the music industry, this could be, as the article suggest, Jobs’ move to stay ahead of the curve. Just when others are playing catch-up with Apple, Apple is looking to change the landscape once again.

This may be the reason for other news of an attempt to unseat Apple as the kind of online media distribution. But then again, one of the players there is Disney. Hmmm.

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