Jobs Joins The Yellowcoats

Apple marked February 6th with something many, many people have been waiting for for a long time. Since the dawn of the Age of iPod, the world has wondered whether the new technologies that would be developed down the road would wear peacenik garb or be the bread and butter in an era of restriction, effectively making consumers prisoners of a world their earned currency created. I make that sound like a nightmare, don’t I? But already happened. We’re living it.

Today we have things like FairPlay and PlaysForSure, which ensure that record companies can continue working their ancient profit models (however poorly they’ve managed to do so up to this point) and carry on being unadaptive grumps. Independent subsidiaries of the Big Four try to make headway in making things more fair for the people. But on the whole, the behemoths in control of the vast majority of media out in stores today, both Internet-based and brick and mortar, aren’t giving up any ground on digital downloads.

Until now. Kind of.

Like I said earlier, February 6th marked an important day for consumers, however calculated the main event of the day indeed was or was not. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc, published an essay on the iPod maker’s website which pinned the blame for the public grief that has arisen over the years from dealings with the DRM software placed on the songs purchased from sites like Walmart.com and iTunes.com squarely on Big Media’s shoulders. And while we can’t forget Apple’s hand in plaguing the world with DRM – they developed FairPlay, after all - it makes sense that Jobs would confirm himself and his company a natural adversary of the digital restrictions they were required to administer to each and every item sold on iTunes in order to get Universal, EMI, BMG, and Warner to sell their content digitally over the Internet.

Jobs went on to state that only about 3% of the songs stored on the tens of millions of iPods in existence today were purchased from the iTunes store. He sort of generalized, but that’s okay. Just factor in the some-more-some-less variant and we can move on to the most important issue Jobs talked about: The need to start stripping away the DRM – an initiative that the record companies would need to champion, most likely starting with one major label, then a second, and so on and so forth – in order for the public to fully embrace the idea that tangible albums will someday not be necessary to hold onto. There are either a great number of people download songs via Bittorrent technology, it’ll be many years before CDs cease to be manufactured in large quantities, at which time they’ll be seen similarly to the way we view vinyl today. But that day will come, and when it does, digital downloads similar or smarter and more consumer-friendly measure to keep one from requiring a pocket lawyer to sift through legalese and unwanted malware.

I won’t babble on, as there’s no need for me to do so. If you want to read about Jobs’ essay, cut out the middle man and just read the essay. But if 2/6/07 marks the day that we started to wipe off the ‘criminal’ tags the Big Four have taken the liberty to give us, everyone will be better for it - from studio to store - and begin take advantage of the much-needed competition resulting from the sale of songs devoid of DRM.

Pick apart Jobs’ essay if you will, and even consider it a cunning way to win over millions of frustrated and on-the-fence Apple customers; to give the company a healthy boost to its stock back up near $100; or to keep the protesters away from Apple storefronts. Whatever the case may be, this was a smart move. Jobs is known to be an irritant of the music industry but a necessary partner, and this will irk them some more. Fortunately for the us, the best person capable of pushing their buttons hard enough just did. Not a moment too soon, and not a moment too late.

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