The day after: "Ditching DRM was EMI's idea"

There is much more, of course, but these DRM-related articles caught our eye.

As per our coverage last year and in February, it turns out that going DRM-free was EMI's idea, not Apple's. Gizmodo spoke to Jeanne Meyer, the Senior VP of Corporate Communications at EMI, who explained that EMI approached Apple, and Apple then came up with the idea to use 256kbps AAC encoding and the $1.29 price for the higher quality, DRM-free individual songs. EMI will allow any of their retailers (online music stores) to sell these tracks and albums, and the retailers may decide on the file format. So presumably, other stores can sell songs in high-bitrate unprotected WMA format if they want, although those songs won't play on the iPod without an extra conversion step.

Meyer explains that the reason that EMI is doing this is because they believe that CDs, which account for 90 percent of their sales right now, will see a decline in sales, or at best, will remain stable, but online sales will grow in importance the coming years. They expect those to be 25 percent of their sales by 2010, including the mobile phone market, which is 500 billion handsets, by Gizmodo's account. The people at Gizmodo need to check their keyboards, because when they type "million," it apparently comes out as "billion." 500 million is still several times more than all the digital music players ever sold. Gizmodo continues:

Although Jobs says, "We expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year," EMI says the first of the new tracks will be on sale in May.

Apple said that too, both yesterday at the London event and in later statements, although it's not in AppleInsider's transcript of the Q&A session that followed the announcement.

In another article, AppleInsider cites Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster who thinks liberation from the oppression that is DRM will sell more iPods. Wait a minute—why would the availability of DRM-free tracks on iTunes and other stores lead to more iPod sales?

Our belief is the success of the iPod is not because consumers are locked on the iTunes platform, but its success has been because of the total device and iTunes experience.

I agree that the iPod's success isn't because of iTunes lock-in, but in my opinion, the iTunes Store is only one of the ingredients for the iPod's success, and not the most prominent one at that. Munster estimates that on average, 5 percent of the music on a given iPod was bought from the iTunes Store. This is in line with earlier reports that for each iPod, around 20 songs have been sold. A lot has been said about these figures, but whichever way you slice them, the only explanation can be that the majority of iPod owners already manage to find the majority of their music in DRM-unencumbered ways, so it's hard to see how the addition of (some) DRM-free music to the iTunes Store will make much of a difference—apart from the fact that those other forms of unprotected content don't benefit from Apple's continuous PR and marketing assault. Opening up the iTunes Store for more countries, making a wider selection of music available in the existing countries, and not requiring the iTunes software to buy music could all do much more to widen the appeal of the iPod-iTS combo.