The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Apple’s god-king recently announced that he’d be happy to sell
music without DRM. I even sort-of believe him. That is, I believe
he’s not delighted to be a sell-out, and would rather do business in a
Whole Earth-friendly way than otherwise… as long as both are
massively profitable.

Ed Felten at Princeton followed up with his own note on the
furor. I think he misses a point, though. Jobs wrote:

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from
one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only
using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific
player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s
music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the
iTunes store—they are the industry’s most popular products and we
have accurate data for them. 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 and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the
music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open
formats. Its 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.

But he’s trying to slip something by you. Even if Apple strips out
DRM and ceases to hold a monopoly on players-of-FairPlay-music,
they’ll still have the only convenient HW player for AAC. AAC may be
an open standard, but outside of Apple and some weird Archos gear, you
don’t see it at the BestBuy.