Requiem for DRM

Most people who by default use iTunes are unaware that it is about to change, in a big way. At Macworld, the most important technological conference for Apple consumers (which ironically will no longer feature an appearance of Apple from now on), Phil Schiller (Apple’s vice president of product marketing) has announced that two major changes were going to be made with the most used music download program in the world. Firstly there would no longer be any DRM, and secondly there would be a new three-tier pricing system. Of course all Apple aficionados who were present at the conference rejoiced, but that is a something that can be ignored since they would have done so no matter what the Apple representative on stage would have said (yes, they’re that devout to the company…).

Now to most people DRM is yet another acronym of obscure meaning, yet it was until now a very controversial feature of all music downloaded off iTunes. DRM stands for “digital rights management”, and it is software attached to downloaded songs used for copy protection. What this means is that if you buy a song off iTunes, you will only be able to use it on a single MP3 player. You will not be able to make a copy of the music file and give it to your friends; you will not even be able to use it on another player that you yourself own. And as it happens the only player that will play iTunes DRM protected songs is the iPod. Furthermore removing the DRM protection from music is excessively hard.

So this sounds like something that Apple would not like to remove, since it makes anyone who owns music from iTunes or who wants to buy music from iTunes completely dependent to the iPod in order to play the songs. Yet surprisingly in 2007 Apple CEO and founder, Steve Jobs, had published an open letter saying that DRM prevented the market of downloadable music from being truly fulfilled, and should be removed entirely. And this is what Apple is now achieving for its software. It has signed agreements with almost all the major record producing companies which imposed the DRM for it to be removed By now 8 million songs from the iTunes library are DRM free, and Apple has promised that this will be the case for the entire 10 million songs by the end of this quarter. Of course people who have already bought music from iTunes with DRM protection will be able to download it again without it for free.

Then perhaps Apple aficionados were right to rejoice after all! Journalists however have been quick to spell doom and gloom over the announcement. Now that there is nothing preventing people from using iTunes downloaded songs on MP3 players other than iPods, they are predicting iPod sales to dramatically fall. However I myself am not so sure of this. It isn’t necessarily true that given more freedom consumers will instinctively seek to go elsewhere, and people are too swift to forget that the iPod’s success is what also made iTunes successful in the first place.

Although currently iTunes represents 70% of the market share for downloadable music, it was the only major software that still sold DRM protected music. Removing DRM was necessary for iTunes to remain competitive. People for whom DRM was a major inconvenience would have already stopped using iTunes by now, and may be tempted to use it now that DRM is gone, whereas others will probably keep using iTunes because of it’s ease of use, and because of the multiple features that it offers when coupled with the iPod (such as genius play lists).