m2cw – my 2 cents worth

yesterday, steve jobs published a very rare open letter on his “thoughts on music”, which covered the issue of DRM in music.

here are three thoughts/predictions i’m having (incl. links where those have been inspired):

1. apple will start becoming its own label (inspired by this comment on macalope): with the beatles/apple fight out of the way and apple now owning the “apple” brand (and licensing it to the beatles for their apple records) it could really mean that apple will start becoming its own label and as such selling DRM-free music on itunes. this would be huge as it would be in direct competition to the big four (sony/bmg, emi, universal and warner).

2. apple might start selling drm-free indie label music soon: despite becoming its own label apple could start pushing the four big labels by selling unsigned artists (as outlined here. this way jobs would put his money where his mouth is…

3. if the labels follow jobs, he might have just killed podshow’s business case with podsafe music… (i’m really looking forward to adam curry’s thoughts on this)

only time will tell…

update: adam curry’s thoughts are very, very good and right on the money! (listen to DSC #541). he pretty much follows this argument

this entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 07:59 and is filed under business, general, web. you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. both comments and pings are currently closed.