Music Monopoly - Liberate the Music!

I wandered over to Apple and discovered a link on the home page to an essay by Steve Jobs on music. He makes many good points. Among them

• iPod users are not locked into buying their music from the Apple iTunes Store,
• billions of CDs are sold by the major music companies (who control 70% of the music) every year with absolutely no protection at all, and
• DRM (Digital Rights Management) has primarily created an international game with cryptographers creating increasingly difficult locks that uncrytpers (primarily thieves) keep trying (sometimes successfully) to break.

Steve's recommendation:

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.

Great decision! If you'd like to know more about his argument then hie thee to the link. I'm a sucker for great writing, facts and consistent logic. If you are too, you will find reading the essay time well spent.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. – John Lennon