Steve Jobs: Saviour Of Music

The posting of Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Music last week has resulted in a flurry of pro and con responses. With impeccable logic he proposed that the music industry should drop DRM and allow unrestricted music files to be bought and shared. Tech companies agreed. Avril Lavigne manager Terry McBride agreed. The RIAA and labels were knee-jerk predictable: Warner’s Edgar Bronfman pooh-poohed it with the argument that music should enjoy the same protections that the film and TV industries have for their copyrighted work. I guess he hasn’t been on Pirate Bay.

Steve is hardly being altruistic. Various EU governments have ruled that Apple has to open up its FairPlay DRM system to competitors, letting customers buy and play digital music on any player. Steve has never embraced collaboration and argues that disseminating coordinated security repairs to hundreds of millions of players, across multiple partners, within the timeframe demanded by the major record labels, “is near impossible”.

Central to his argument is that a key provision of Apple’s agreements with the labels is that if compromised DRM (allowing the labels’ music to be played on “unauthorized devices”) isn’t fixed within the agreed period, “they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store."

With contract renewals approaching, this is a clever bid to move the problem over to the labels. Simultaneously he’s made the EU a bogey-man and put pressure on a weakness in Apple’s music provision contracts.

His logic for DRM-free music is cunning and impeccable. “The big four music companies…sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music…So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.” He starts to look like a champion of the people.

Steve is a music-loving man. He’s successfully reinvigorated animation films through his ownership of Pixar. With music in a parlous state and the big labels alienating their customers on a daily basis, the idea of Steve Jobs, music champion, leads to all sorts of interesting speculation.

Twenty years ago in Tokyo I overheard a conversation on the Tube between two high-school boys, one American, one British. The British guy asked his friend who he wanted to be like when he graduated. The American shrugged. The Briton said, “I want to be like Richard Branson.” Naturally, the American didn’t know who he was, so his friend reeled off a string of Branson’s entrepreneurial virtues and the coolness of the Virgin brand.

How many young people want to be like Steve Jobs and think that Apple is cool? How many want to be like Edgar Bronfman and dig Warners?