Almost exactly a year ago, on February 6, 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry asking for it to move to a model in which it sold music that was free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection. At the time, I wrote that it was a brave but smart move for Jobs to essentially ask music companies to sell music that was not forced to be played on an iPod.
Apple immediately began selling DRM-free music from industry upstart, EMI, but many of the other labels criticized Jobs' letter. But over the past few months, other record companies have gotten on board - and this week, the final player, Sony-BMG, has agreed to make its music available DRM-free.
Analysts say that a main driver has been the 9.5% fall in album sales in 2007. The record companies are growing desperate. Further, I'm sure that the Apple/EMI experiment proved that consumers would pay more for the benefit of flexible file ownership. And, as expected, the move is already resulting in more competition for Apple. Warner is selling its DRM-free music through Amazon.com, and the open format could create music businesses for Facebook and MySpace.
It's another reason to love Steve Jobs - and proof that challenge drives improvement.
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