“It’s over. Restrictions on copying digital music are going to be history — and all hell could break loose in the music retail business,” Kevin Kelleher reports for TheStreet.com.
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, what is this, February 6, 2007? Or it is April 2, 2007? Whichever it is, welcome to the party. Finally.
Kelleher continues, “Amazon.com’s move to sell more than 2 million songs free of digital rights management software, or DRM, could well be seen several years from now as the point of no return for this controversial technology.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it could be, Kevin, but only if you totally ignore February 6, 2007 and April 2, 2007.
Kelleher continues, “The days of music companies telling consumers when and how they can listen to their songs are numbered.”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin’s a newsman. It’s just old news that he prefers. Just how much of February 6, 2007 did you sleep through, all of it?
Kelleher continues, “Amazon’s move is — to lean on that useful but overused buzz phrase — a tipping point. DRM is a well-intentioned idea that served to drive many music consumers away.”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, the tipping point occurred on April 2, 2007 as precipitated by the event that happened on February 6, 2007. Yes, we know. You slept in.
Kelleher continues, “One of the biggest beneficiaries of DRM has been Apple. As Daniel Del’Re pointed out in his coverage of the Amazon announcement, when people buy songs on iTunes, ‘the only portable music device on which users can play back songs is the iPod.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, which part of the following did you not understand exactly?
…Abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat… Convincing [the music labels] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs on, you guessed it, February 6, 2007
Furthermore, have Mac and PC notebooks with iTunes been reclassified as “non-portable” devices, Kevin? If not, then iPods have never been the only portable music devices on which users can play back music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Store. It certainly felt portable enough listening to iTunes Store music on a MacBook Pro while cruising at 30,000 feet on our last plane trip, Kevin. Of course, simply burning a CD from iTunes (iTunes is a software application, Kevin, it differs from the iTunes Store which is actually an online service accessed via the iTunes application) and either playing that CD on a portable CD player (is that a “portable” enough music device, Kevin?) or reimporting it into other also-ran MP3 players also proves the utter fallacy of your and Daniel Del’Re’s statement.
Kelleher continues, “In that way, DRM has served as a retaining wall for Apple, keeping the owners of 100 million iPods sold to date within the iTunes corral when they buy music. (Well, most of them. Our house is home to three iPods, and we have yet to buy a single song through iTunes for this very reason.)”
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin, our not-too-bright friend, if you have 3 iPods and you’ve never bought a single song from the iTunes Store, then — unless you’ve never listened to music on any of your iPods — then you’ve just conclusively proven that iPod owners are in no way “corralled” into buying music from the iTunes Store. Logic is your friend, Kevin. So is chronological order. Try them both someday.
Of course, if you hadn’t missed February 6, 2007, you would have read Steve Jobs’ letter which explained quite clearly, “Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold. Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store… It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.”
Kelleher continues ignorantly congratulating Amazon and misunderstanding what’s really happening in his full piece, Think Before You Click™, here.