I don't think he backs up his claim that Apple's copy protection is bad for business at all. He admits that using it makes some money for the music business. A claim that it's bad for business can only be justified by a suggestion for a different way they can do things that would be better from a business perspective, that is, make more money. Since he rails against Apple's copy protection, but also says that all the other copy protection schemes are worse, I don't see any justification for his claim. It's pretty clear that the model "Just put all the music up on the internet, copy-protection-free, and let anyone make copies of it for free" is not a profitable business model. But he doesn't suggest anything better.
He is in fact suggesting that "let anyone make copies of it for free" is a profitable business model:
Apple sold a billion tracks in three years in spite of its DRM, not because of it. No Apple customer bought an iTune because of the DRM. What's more, every track in the iTunes music store can be downloaded for free from P2P networks. Apple proves that you can sell music without DRM all day long -- all adding DRM to Apple's music does is give Apple the ability to abuse its customers and its partners from the labels.
In other words, Apple is making money selling a product that people could get elsewhere for free-- in fact a product that is in some ways inferior to the one they could get for free, because it includes DRM. He's suggesting that if Apple dropped the DRM part, it would sell even more, and he's speculating that Yahoo Music will beat them, since it's ignoring DRM and concentrating on adding things that customers actually want.
I can't agree with his claim. It's one thing to cry about DRM, and it's another thing to predict that a company will lose to another, but you cannot simply say "here is something I don't like and thus they will lose, because things I don't like shouldn't win."
He seems to know an awful lot about consumers... my, they have the same tastes and political biases he does! And the huge evidence that destroys his claim can be put under the rug! This is neat!
Compare this: "That's a lesson Yahoo Music has taken to heart -- they're abandoning DRM, shipping MP3s, and putting their engineering effort into producing a superior product." (Last sentence in the article.)
Yep, according to the a blog post from a Yahoo Music engineer that the Information Week article talks about, they're starting with just one track (from Jessica Simpson). It's not clear whether they will convert all their existing DRM tracks to mp3, or whether this will only apply to new tracks that get added. I think the main decision was to stop spending engineer time developing DRM for future offerings.
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"that don't impress me much"
everytime i hear him or read him i'm not very impressed by the quality of his thought.
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With this: "The song files provided through the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service are in a WMA format. They come as part of your music subscription, or as individual, burnable downloads." http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/music/yme/portable/portable-56174.html
Is there something I'm not seeing?
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