ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

A canny business tycoon promoting an option that says the music industry may be better off without DRM? Finally! Someone of this stature saying this, this is big news - someday, consumers will gain back the rights they always had, and DRM will be relegated to the industry's dust-bins, where it belongs. May take decades, but one step at a time, this will eventually happen.

Here's the article at Apple's web site - Thoughts on Music by Steve Jobs.

As some commentators have suggested, that article may have been prompted by legal troubles, but it is still worth reading, for promoting what it calls the "third alternative" - the music industry may be hurting itself, and that Apple itself is open to supporting a world where music does not have to be restricted by being wrapped in DRM locks. A DRM-free world is not only important to consumers, but could be good for business too, which is the main group supporting DRM.

Apple's iTunes is certainly the world's largest music store in terms of volume - and it uses DRM. eMusic.com is the second-largest online music store, and it does not use digital rights management - here's how they describe their service on their web site [January 2007]:
eMusic is the world’s largest retailer of independent music and the world’s second-largest digital music retailer overall, offering more than 2 million tracks from more than 13,000 independent labels spanning every genre of music. A subscription-based service that allows consumers to own, not rent their music, eMusic is the largest service to sell tracks in the popular MP3 format – the only digital music format that is compatible with all digital music devices ...