02.07.07
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.
Mez said,
February 22, 2007 at 5:32 pm
well said! something I didn’t actually think about when I read Steve’s Letter on drm.
da bishop said,
August 17, 2007 at 6:03 am
Well, this is a fair point. However, the sale of data is inherently ridiculous.
The reason why itunes is so good is because it browses via the itunes browser, and integrates with your music player. You don’t have to manage the files, or file structures yourself, and it will sync easily with devices.
There is the value in itunes. It’s not that it’s doing something that can’t be done any other way, it’s the fact that the user experience is very low stress.
The users choose itunes, not the labels.
wfrantz said,
August 17, 2007 at 9:24 am
No matter how great the user experience is on iTunes, if the labels stopped the flow of content, the users would choose something else. In 1999 Napster was an awful user experience, but people went to it in droves.
Nothing is stopping the labels from providing their own great user experience that integrates well with iTunes (the application, not the store). For example, say I’m Mega Pop Records. You create a Mega Pop account and give me $0.99 for a song. I give you a custom, Mega Pop RSS feed of your purchases. You add that feed to iTunes and presto, all your Mega Pop purchases land on your iPod. Purchase a new song, sync your ‘Pod and magically the new songs appear. The iTunes RSS reader does all the heavy lifting.