Interesting essay by Steve Jobs about DRM.
“Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.”
You missed out the arrogant line:
He’s trying to justify their lack of interoperability by saying the loss the user would experience is small. If I buy one song, I want to take it with me. I’ve ripped my old collection of CDs that I’ve collected over the past 15 odd years, so it’s not surprising that they make up the bulk of my collection compared to MP3s I’ve bought online. If all my future purchases are online, that 3% is going to grow, it’s just a matter of catch up.
I won’t use the iTunes store because of the DRM. My iPod’s battery now sucks and I have no inclination to buy another one. My phone makes a pretty good music player, as does my laptop. Closed DRM systems will only work if the manufacturer, Apple, controls every bit of hardware I want to play music on, and that’s not going to happen.