David Fredh : Blog and Pictures

Today Apple made an announcement that iTunes will be totally DRM free from April 2009. DRM stands for Digital rights management and is a “nice word” for copy protection. Already today most of the music on iTunes is available without DRM. The DRM-free music (called iTunes+) has a lot better sound-quality as well.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music. – Steve Jobs, February 6 2007

Last year when I read this I did not believe him. When iTunes used DRM, the songs could only be played on iPods. This made people stick to their Apple-player in favor of other brands. I choose an iPod instead of the beautiful and cheep iRiver only because of all my DRM-protected music on iTunes.

This means also that the big 4 music companies have agreed on that DRM was yesterday’s technology. It also means that many other music-stores will pop up with their own DRM-free content during 2009. DRM has been a big limitation since every music-store has been dependent on microsofts copy-protection in WMA-format and it’s also one reason to why Apple has been so dominating with their unique iTunes-iPod connection that make DRM-enabled digital music downloading enjoyable. Now when DRM is gone, then iTunes will be more and more like just another music-store.

You can still stick to iTunes even if you have another mp3-player. It’s easy to copy music to any other player via drag-and-drop or a 3rd party software (for example: Salling Media Sync).

So, I Think Apple won the battle against the music companies, their competitors won the war that they have been fighting for so long … against iTunes.