Decompiling Apples Thoughts on Music

Imagine everyone plugged into iPods

Digital Rights Management?

The key words in this next blog right now are RIGHTS (as in Rights and Freedoms. Declarations. Constitutions. Charters. Bills.) and MANAGEMENT (as in Managers, Marketers, Distributors, Middlemen, etc.).

Apple Lies to Sell You Ipods

Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player. (Apple's Thoughts on Music, Feb 6, 2007)

And here we have the first untruth being fed out to the general public. "No DRM system was ever developed for the CD." This is false and hasn't been true for 4 years. But thanks to the complexity of the internet, it's quiet easy for information of this kind of be lost. However, I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs of all people would have know of the Weedshare network. It is Internet dependent. It also requires a PC made during the last 10 years and also run on Macs that boot Windows. But it most assuredly runs on CD. And CDs are cheap to make. So are DVDs.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system. (Apple's Thoughts on Music, Feb 6, 2007)

Now lets look at Apple's iPod sales since they first released the iPod in 2001. They are currently closing in if not passing the 100 million sales mark. Estimating a low value of $300 per iPod, that means they're currently topping $30 billion in sales on these luxury music machines. Yet at the same time, this is only a fraction of the income from a purely digital marketplace, which sold under 2 billion songs in 2006. Which means that the rise of file-sharing in regards to their distribution model now makes all currently existing digital media effectively worthless or valueless except for it's abstract value as art, which remains priceless. Instead, the hardware is where the real value is now. Effectively, Apple and the Major Labels are more interested in selling you iPods than music. (Labels hit back at Apple, now want share of iPod revenues)

DRM-free music: EMI calls the tune and Apple takes the credit

Next article: How Microsoft and Shared Media dropped the ball on the world's first Digital Stockmarket.