At a press conference today in London, England, EMI and Apple announced that they will sell unDRMd music starting in May, 2007. Sorry for the scattered look of all of this, but I wanted to get it posted as fast as possible:
Apple Press Release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html
Quick notes:
Jobs: Need to take online music distribution to the next level:
need to address interoperability
audio quality: new versions of songs, higher quality 256kbps AAC $1.29 / track. easily upgrade entire library for $0.30/song; album = same price.
EMI: DRM music is going to be available to all retailers.
Jobs: Apple reaching out to other labels—hopes 1/2 of songs will be DRM free by the end of the year. The right thing for the customer in the future is to tare down the walls of interoperability.
Q: Is this more complicated for consumers? Jobs: People are going to have a choice and set iTunes to pick one. We don’t want to take away anything—want to give consumers the choice. We think consumers are going to choose the higher quality.
Q: How will this impact the iPod/iTunes relationship? Jobs:Always been able to play the mp3s. We compete on best music store.
Consumer groups: Jobs: not offering anything here today that consumers can’t get already on a CD.
Are you giving green light to file sharers? EMI: “need to trust consumers” this doesn’t diminish fight against piracy, key is to give consumers a compelling experience, trust them, educate them, grow sales rather than diminish them.
EMI: hopes that this will grow sales—the main point of doing it.
Jobs: EMI is pioneering something that I Think is going to be very popular.
Jobs: We’re not offering something different. All CDs are provided unprotected and in high quality. Protecting CDs—Sony tried that, it didn’t work out so well.
Q: Are other majors standing in the way of this? Jobs: There are always leaders ad there are always followers. opportunity for everyone to win: customers win; music companies get more money by providing more value.
Video DRM free? Jobs: Video is different. They don’t offer video DRM free today, so I wouldn’t hold them parallel right now.
Do you expect fall in iPod sales: Jobs: No link broken. Always been able to rip and copy to iTunes and put on the player they want to. No real link. Success based on whether people think we have the best and easiest to use music store and music players. Not going to do anything different. Want to be the best music store and the music player.
What’s the point of DRM on cheaper tracks, why not remove it completely? Jobs: For customers that are price sensitive, we don’t want to tell them that we’re taking something away from them. EMI: not everyone cares about sound quality.
Will consumers feel cheated? Jobs: music lovers have a choice, they can go whatever way they want to go. More choice. Life is a balance between total freedom and simplicity. Try to strike the maxims—we think we’ve done a good job of that.
How will it work with other music services? EMI: we only set wholesale prices. We hope this will help to generate growth.
File size on iPods because of larger file size? Storage sizes go up prices go down.
How can you justify 20% increase in price? Jobs: exactly same price as yesterday. New product offers more features, higher sound quality; more flexibility, so higher price. Consumer gets to choose.
Although I strongly support
Although I strongly support DRM free music, I am not impressed by this solution.
Music is created DRM free. DRM a blight that none of us want. I see no reason to pay 30 percent more to fix a problem we did not create.
If I buy something with a defect, caused by the manufacture, it should be the manufactures responsibility to fix the defect at their cost. Why should we pay more to fix what they intentionally made defective by design?
Brian Rowe
www.FreedomforIP.org
I think you make a good
I think you make a good point, Brian, but I really see this as a first step.
Even just a couple of years ago, could you imagine a Major Label selling their content in an open and unprotected format? Today it’s an increase in the per-track price for a higher-quality, more flexible format (and full albums of un-DRM’d music are the same as the DRM’d ones). Tomorrow, there’s nothing preventing a competitor to iTunes from lowering that per track price, and forcing Apple to compete back at $0.99 or lower. Consumers, like yourself, might demand it regardless of the competition.
Should consumers be able to make fair use of content they legally obtain, including switching digital formats to allow for playback on their device of choice, yes! Market decisions like these might be the signs of a tipping point we need to convince policy makers that repealing or amending the DMCA shouldn’t be something to fear, but to welcome.