12 January 2008 @ 12:21PM >>
Matt Walliser writes in to say:
In your January 2 article titled “From Rainbows to Downloads” you suggest (emphasis mine)
when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future.
In February 2006 I wrote to you in regards to iTunes reaching 1 Billion downloads, loosely predicting that the music industry’s reluctance to evolve would only serve to strengthen Apple’s dominant position in the marketplace (or something like that). Recent anti-trust lawsuits filed against Apple with respect to monopolization of format simultaneously reinforce both your point (above) and mine. For clarification’s sake: I’m neither condemning nor condoning the actions Apple has taken that have brought about the lawsuit (predatory pricing of their hardware being the most credible, imho), I’m merely calling it like I see it.
Even though the music business has been fighting the trend towards Apple’s online distribution dominance since at least 2005, ironically, one reason Apple has so much power today is because of bad decisions made by the music labels themselves.
For years, labels have demanded that digital music be burdened with copy protection technology. In order to get permission to sell music through the iTunes Music Store, labels required Apple to implement copy protection, which they did. That technology, called FairPlay, is one of the less onerous copy protection schemes out there, but it does mean that music files purchased through the iTunes Music Store can’t be played by non-Apple devices (although they can be burned onto standard CDs, which can then be used in any standard CD player). In other words, the labels’ insistence on copy protection ended up giving Apple the ability to lock customers into its file formats, thereby making it more difficult for those customers to switch to devices sold by Apple’s competitors.
Steve Jobs has called on the recording industry to abandon copy protection, and after one label granted permission, Apple now sells some songs in MP3 format without copy protection. Competitors like Amazon are now selling music in unprotected MP3 format as well. Maybe the recording industry is slowly waking up.
Still, I can’t help thinking that Steve Jobs is secretly smiling to himself, knowing that the long-running short-sightedness of the music business is part of the reason that Apple enjoys such dominance in online music distribution. If music labels had allowed sales of unprotected MP3s right from the start, Apple’s iPod would probably be just as dominant in the market for portable music players, but the iTunes Music Store would likely be a different story.
