In the midst of investigations by numerous EU countries and the EU itself last year Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs declared that DRM was the culprit behind iTunes inoperability with other devices and together with EMI they launched “iTunes Plus”. The new service featured higher quality songs in a DRM free AAC format and was initially supported by EMI, and then with several independent labels as well. Since then little else has happened with iTunes plus. The once heavily touted offering is now relegated to the back pages of itunes and no other major label has come onboard. So just what happened to iTunes Plus?
If you follow the industry at all you’ll probably already know the answer. The major labels have long had difficulty in doing business with Apple and have felt like minority partners in the iTunes juggernaut. Universal has been the most vocal in their criticism of Apple and their refusal to change their pricing policy to suit the labels. So primarily as an attempt to weaken the market dominance of iTunes they began offering DRM free music, just not to Apples. While the criticism was originally that music purchased through iTunes was only playable on an iPod, the labels began to realize that the problem was the other way around, that people weren’t going to give up their iPods any time soon, and that the real goal was to get music from other services playable on an iPod. As a result they partnered with several other services to launch DRM free music services, the most notable of which is Amazon Mp3
The problem of course, for the Labels was that nobody really cared that much. While Amazon Mp3 quickly rose to the number two spot they did it not by competing with iTunes but rather by wiping out the rest of the competition. Since then there have been a number of high profile casualties in the online music marketplace, including Microsoft’s own MSN Music, and their rather ironically named “play’s for sure” content. The iTunes store continues to roll on without being weakened and the record labels are back to square one. So where does this leave iTunes plus? Apple, I suspect would still love to ditch DRM. It would increase sales as it would open the store up to all those with additional devices, and not necessarily portable music players. Systems like the Sonos for example, or the PS3 and Xbox, all of which can happily play DRM Free AAC files.
The best chance for the Labels now (and don’t for a second think I’m rooting for the record labels) is to try and grow competition to the iPod so that there is a broader landscape of players in use. And they won’t do that by directly trying to get people to change their iPods, especially for anyone with large libraries of fairplay encoded content, but rather by getting people to consider something else in addition to their iPods, again things such as stereos with streaming, game consoles, multi room systems etc. The best way long term for them to grow their digital download sales is to go back to Apple and give them DRM free content. If Amazon continues to grow, their success will put pressure on Apple to adopt more flexible pricing, but shutting Apple out of the DRM free party altogether is not going to work in the long term, it will just entrench people further in the iTunes / iPod ecosystem.
Fortunately for consumers it looks as if finally someone might be seeing the bigger picture as recent rumors have suggested that Sony Music is considering coming to iTunes plus. It would make sense. Sony’s own store, Sony “connect” was a dismal failure and it would be good for Sony’s own players if they could use music from the number one online music store. Hopefully their is some weight to this rumor, and I suspect their is. One can also hope that the other record labels see this move as the push they need and we can move to a DRM free itunes and put the specter of DRM behind us once and for all.
No related posts.
Subscribe To RSS feed
Thanks for sharing this. Keep up the great work. I love Yahoo.