iTunes Plus

(click to see the original comic)
The problem was that the XKCD black hat man was right.  The nice thing is that, as of last week, all music you purchase on iTunes is DRM-free.

I would like to know how this came about.  Apple announced years ago that they would like to move to DRM-free music, and with the "iTunes Plus" thing they were able to free up some of their catalog. Needless to say, those tracks flourished (I only bought iTunes Plus tracks once they were available.) So why didn't the other record companies jump on board immediately?

And here's where it gets political.  The RIAA, ever the enemy of, well, everyone, decided that Apple was too powerful.  This was true; Apple was telling them how much they would sell their music for online, and if they didn't want to play they could just not sell their music through the largest distributor of digital music in the US and by the way, how are sales of CDs doing these days?  For some reason this didn't go over well.  The RIAA likes being the one telling others what they can and can't do, not the other way around.  So when the DRM-free revolution hit they suddenly had a stick.

Even the RIAA has a few people with brains who realized that copy protection doesn't work.  So they were going to have to sell DRM-free tracks sooner or later.  They just didn't want to do it Apple's way.  So they found a good third party: Amazon.  Amazon wanted in to the digital music market, and were progressive enough to understand the consumer value of not having someone else tell you where and when you could play your music.  So they got the deal with all the big publishers to have an entire DRM-free catalog.  Unsuprisingly, it worked very well.  Even I, an iPod-toting Mac user, bought all my music from Amazon. Sure, it comes in the bulky and old-school MP3 compression, but the bitrate is fine and hard drive space is cheap these days.  And I could play it on any of my computers. (And yes, only my computers.  I don't steal music and I don't share it either.)  Suddenly Amazon had what Apple wanted.  Apple still had what the RIAA wanted: access to 90% of portable music players in the US and most other countries.  So you have a nice standoff.

And here's the part that we'll probably never know: Who backed down? It looks like Apple did.  iTunes will break it's $.99 price point that's been in place since the store opened, some tracks will be cheap, some will be expensive.  So it looks like the record companies got their way and are now allowed to charge what they want to charge. (as long as they want to charge $.69, $.99, or $1.29 per song.)

And here's the other question: who lost?  Is Apple making less per track on $.69 songs, or is the recording studio?  That one could swing either way: Apple gets DRM-free, but less per track, or the studios get less per track but sell more tracks. 

We probably won't ever know who backed down, or who lost, but we definitely know who won:

We did.