Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’d be surprised if you hadn’t seen Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”. I’m not even sure what to call it; the thing is just so genre defying coming from the CEO of the company that controls the digital music market. But let’s say I’ve settled on calling it an article press release post manifesto open letter.

The internet has been abuzz about Jobs’s communique ever since its release last week, and if this is the first you’re hearing of it, I honestly feel a swell of pity for you.  Though ostensibly the letter is about digital music, it’s really about digital rights management.  If you can’t wrap your head around the concept of DRM, “Thoughts on Music” is an easily understandable outline of how the system is supposed to work, and why it’s doomed to fail.  I’m trying not to repeat what’s already been said, so for deeper analysis, you can check out the always interesting John Gruber.

It’s a gutsy move, to be sure, but Apple is in an excellent position to make it.  Hypothetically, Apple comes to the negotiating table and asks to do away with DRM.  Hypothetically, the record companies say no and pull out of iTunes.  Great.  Now they’ve lost the single biggest distribution channel for digital music.  Now they’ve got to start from square one and build their own music stores, which, it’s a fair bet, won’t be as good as iTunes.  They’ll also have to install their own unique flavor of DRM, thus preventing their songs from ever playing on an iPod (which, just in case you’re groggy, is the most popular music player on earth by a wide margin).  Apple, meanwhile, can still sell iPods, which according to Jobs’s figures are 97% filled with non-DRM music anyway.  They’ll also still have all that video in the store.  All in all, it’s a pretty bad scenario for the record companies, and that’s without speculating on the consumer backlash.

Then there’s the other option.  Hypothetically, the record companies agree with Apple and decide to ditch DRM.  Everybody wins.  The litigious Frenchmen get to play iTunes music on lè Zune, consumers aren’t locked into one player, technical overhead at Apple probably decreases just a bit, and the record companies sell more music.

Let me explain that last thing.  I hate DRM systems with a passion, for all the reasons that Jobs and others have discussed.  The system is untenable, does nothing to curb real piracy (parrots, hats, planks, and DVD pressing machines), and only inconveniences honest consumers.  Those honest consumers, by the way, are lazy.  Sure, obtaining music illegally via a BitTorrent file gets easier every week, but it still requires a level of effort that most people don’t want to expend.  They, and I, would much rather just open iTunes, point, click, and buy.  I guarantee you that if iTunes’s music wasn’t wrapped in DRM (and all its unspoken problems), iTunes would be selling more music, not less.  DRM is the reason I’ve never bought anything in iTunes without a gift certificate.  Remove DRM, and (though I can’t make promises) I’d be buying music like candy.

As long as we’re here, the nightmare scenario that the record companies are imagining is…what, exactly?   Rampant music piracy (parrots, hats, planks), or a massive increase of it?  I fail to see how opening up iTunes could contribute significantly to piracy.  The Asian-based piracy rings that make mass copies of everything from Britney Spears CDs to Harry Potter novels certainly won’t be affected, nor will the extant BitTorrent sites.  At worst, you’d have people sharing small quantities of music among their friends, which is little worse than allowing people to burn copies of CDs or, going back a few years, make a mix tape.

Apple’s contracts with the record companies come up for renewal in March, if I’m not mistaken.  In the words of Arrested Development‘s G.O.B., “COME ON!”