So, I might or might not be interviewed by On the Media soon regarding my thoughts about the Apple/EMI deal that will soon bring us DRM-free iTunes music downloads. It’ll basically depend on if they can find me a studio in Toronto or not — I’ll keep you posted. In collecting these thoughts, the following thing occurred to me: I have no idea if it’s a good thing or not. After giving it some more thought, it’s definitely good, bad and ugly…I mean, unclear. This is the most theoretical I’ve gotten in awhile, so definitely click through to see what it’s all about.
The EMI deal is good, because DRM sucks. Everyone knows it sucks, including the record and movie companies, and people crack the protection schemes all the time. There are multiple pieces of software you can download that will make a pre-EMI deal iTunes song into a piece of totally unrestricted media. This is an acknowledgment of that fact. This is particularly true for music, where DRM never existed on CDs until people started making Mp3s and posting them to web sites and then to Napster. Hell, a CD from China will play as well on my stereo as a CD from the U.S would. This is not the case with DVDs.
The EMI deal is bad, because Apple is making no gestures whatsoever toward lifting the restrictions it has on video content sold through iTunes. It infuriates me that I can download an episode of The Colbert Report, but the only way I can actually watch it on my TV is to plug my computer into my TV or to buy an AppleTV. I can’t burn a DVD and watch it in my normal home theater. Steve Jobs made it clear in his commentary against DRM a few weeks back that his views only applied to music. This is ludicrous. There is nothing different about video and audio, especially as it pertains to TV shows, which are paid by advertising before anyone even sees them. It’s no wonder that video downloads are more niche — even under iTunes’ previous model, I could buy a song and burn it to a CD. That’s not the case, and the EMI deal confirms that Apple is fine with video being a totally locked-up format.
The EMI deal is ugly or uncertain because we don’t know that people will pay extra money to have totally unrestricted music. The success of iTunes suggests that they probably won’t. How do we know this? CDs cost more than albums do on iTunes. And yet iTunes has experienced rapid growth (more than 2 billion songs sold and counting) while the record industry as a whole has been in decline. What can possibly explain this?
Well, we’re actually not sure. It might be that people just love the convenience of iTunes and are willing to accept the burden of DRM in order to enjoy their music NOW. On the other hand, maybe it truly is all about price. What’s fascinating about the EMI deal is that we now get to see this theory tested in the marketplace. If, as some analysts have posited, DRM is a roadblock to long-term growth in digital media downloads, people should really take to the DRM-free versions of the songs — they’re as convenient as regular iTunes, but they’re also free of restrictions. But guess what? Though Apple hasn’t said how much albums of DRM-free music will cost, we can guess it will be about $13, instead of $10, if the extrapolation from song price is accurate. That’s a lot closer to the cost of CDs, which are also free of DRM. Therefore, we can see whether it was convenience or cost that has driven the success of iTunes. If it’s convenience, the better-sounding, totally free of restrictions EMI songs should take off compared to the restricted songs. If it’s not, and if price is the actual issue, then the 99-cent song model will continue to rule the day.
Here’s the sad thing: The latter outcome would mean that the record industry and record stores faltered in the earlier part of this decade not because of MP3 downloads, but because they charged prices so high that people were looking for an escape from. Which means that they could have saved themselves a lot of grief by just selling new albums for $10 instead of $18.
But hey, that’s kind of how history happens.
Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete’s particular Apple avocations are both around design–interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!
