Jobs on DRM

Steve Jobs has published his thoughts on music, and basically, what it boils down to is that DRM sucks, and you can blame the music industry for it. A lot of people have been pushing Apple, being the largest supplier of DRM-protected music, to either open FairPlay to the industry to allow interoperability, or drop DRM altogether. As Jobs points out, this isn't really his call. The music industry -- the big four -- have placed the DRM restriction on digital music distribution, in order to control distribution of their music. As crazy as it may seem, the music industry however, has not wholeheartedly embraced DRM. For the 2 billion of DRM-protected songs that were sold online last year, there were 20 billion songs sold by the music industry, completely DRM-free, via unprotected CDs. Why do they do this? Because the music industry wants to make sure their songs can be played by as many CD players as possible, and those device manufacturers have not included DRM in their CD players. With the MP3 player market however, the music industry saw an opportunity to take consumers hostage and extract payments for the same song on multiple devices. This is not about piracy. If it was, CDs would be DRM protected.