Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Steve Jobs Inadvertantly Kills iTunes

I found Steve Job's open letter (Apple - Thoughts on Music) kind of funny.

What I'm laughing about is that Jobs is basically calling for the destruction of the iTunes Music Store. Think about it. If the record labels decide to just sell open, MP3 files; why do they need iTunes? Wouldn't they just create universalmusic.com, bmgmusic.com, etc. and start selling directly to the consumer? Why make Apple the middle man?

The ONLY reason the big four work with Apple is because iTMS is the ONLY way to sell DRM content to 80% of the portable player market. Heck, anybody can sell content to iPods if you remove the "DRM" requirement. Look at Podcasting. Without DRM the labels would eliminate as many middle men and competition as possible in order to maximize profit. Bye, bye iTMS, Napster, et. al.

I don't think Steve thought this one through. Without DRM, iTMS is only useful as a promotion tool. That might help smaller labels, but the big four don't need a promotion tool. Music promotion is their core business.

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