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The "New" DRM
Page 1 of 2 "Conscience. What a thing. If you believe you got a conscience it'll pester you to death. But if you don't believe you got one, what could it do t'ya? Makes me sick, all this talking and fussing about nonsense." -- Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Sometimes when folks are trying to run you out of town on a rail the best thing you can do is start leading the parade. The guy from Cupertino (hint: that's Steve) made a bold move in that direction with his Manifesto posted on the Apple web site. He turned to the crowd and said... "Wait a minute folks my lowly little anywhere music player/music site isn't the problem. The devils in your own back yard made me do it." He's right... and he's wrong. The entertainment industry is right... and they're wrong. The entertainment consumer is right... and he/she is wrong. It all boils down to DRM (digital rights management) and CA (conditional access) of content. By deftly deflecting the issue from Apple's phenomenal iPod/iTunes success to the requirements the music industry laid down that enabled the company to garner more than 60% of the mobile music player market his posting may force the industry to finally work together for the... consumer. Once content became digital it became tradable - easily swappable across the internet. People have learned to suppress their conscience regarding the content they grab, enjoy, pass around willingly. Jobs notes that his DRM only protects the content on iPods that are legally purchased from iTunes. According to his figures that's less than 3% and the rest comes from... anywhere/everywhere, legal/illegal. Truth is online music purchasing has increased. According to the Online Publishes Association (OPA) online paid sales were $1.3 billion in '02 and $2 billion in '05. While these sales were generated by RealNetworks, AOL, YouTube, LimeWire, Yahoo and others; iTunes was the runaway leader in download music sales. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) download sales are still only a fraction of physical content sales. That would be okay but those sales are falling. Since it was introduced, iTunes has enjoyed 1 billion song sales. That's only logical. You bought into Steve's vision of the super cool, super hip white earbuds/cords. Of course you're going to buy into his super smooth way of getting the music! Who knew there were strings attached? Oh yeah a few disgruntled folks in Europe and those pesky folks who file class action suits. Wanna use someone else's player? Go somewhere else to buy your music. Wanna throw someone else's music on your iPod? Have at it. Folks are... According to BigChampagne (an Internet measurement firm) more than 15 billion songs were "illegally" downloaded last year. Maybe that's why the music industry's physical (unprotected) content sales are in... the toilet. Disc sales declined another 4.9% according to Neilsen SoundScan. But online song swapping was up. This is probably the only time you can't blame the kids for the sales decline. Sales were actually up for the teens and tweens. More than we can say for the other entertainment enjoyment age categories. So obviously we all know the problem. Its Steve's closed environment!
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