Apple’s iTunes is the best music store…

I’m not making my title’s statement lightly. I’ve been very impressed with Apple’s ability to keep focused on the consumers in the world of digital media purchases. There’s a lot of talk of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and how to use it to make sure people get paid for their artwork. Do some quick research on Wikipedia about DRM if you don’t know the details. Let’s look at some facts…

• Apple allows up to 5 computers to be registered at any one time to play every item you purchase from the iTunes music store.
• You can change the computers registered at any time as many times as you want.
• You can play purchased music on an unlimited number of iPods.
• They allow independent musicians to sell their music (though an intermediary like cdbaby.com, that’s what I did!!)
• You can burn any purchased music onto any number of CDs. They even acknowledge that you can re-rip the CD back into your library effectively stripping the music of DRM (at a cost of re-compression of course).

These are incredibly generous allowances! It’s difficult to find any other major producer of DRM’d music purchasable online that gives you this level of freedom. Yet people have been ticked that Apple keeps it’s DRM system, FairPlay, close to it’s vest. Why don’t they license their technology to other companies so we can have other designs for an iPod? Are we locked into keeping all our purchased music in iTunes and on our iPods? What if we want to switch to a different MP3 player?

So, Steve Jobs has finally spoken out on the issue. Here’s the article, straight from the Apple presses. Here’s a quote:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. 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. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

It’s the music publishing companies’ fault!!! They are pressuring the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and any other online music stores to wrap their media in crippling DRM. So let’s stop blaming Apple for using DRM. Blame the music companies. For the bad pop music nowadays, and also for the DRM.