If you missed it, Steve Jobs published a letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” at Apple’s website. In general, the letter has been well-received, including at such unlikely locations as Planet GNOME, but a few good points have been brought up, and I thought I’d chime in.

The essay is written in the style I would expect Steve to write him, i.e. I can imagine him talking in this very manner. His candor, down-to-earthness and compassion match the style of presentation he gives at keynotes. I have no doubt that he received a lot of advice and input from people around him, especially on things he is or isn’t allowed to say due to legal/contractual stipulations, but that being said, I do believe he essentially wrote this, or the majority of it. It almost feels like a blog entry, of the highly-insightful, well-developed sort, not your average MySpace-cliché one. But, that’s silly, of course; he already has a blog.

Which brings up the first set of questions: is this truly his opinion? Is he flip-flopping? Is he trying to appeal to consumers and/or redirect the attention away from Apple and make the content industries the new target?

Let’s look back at March 2002, a year and almost two months before the iTunes Music Store had launched; negotiations with the “Big Four” were certainly well underway, but the outcome probably still uncertain. Macworld quotes him from a Wall Street Journal interview:

“If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own,” said Jobs.

Sounds like a decidedly anti-DRM, anti-copy protection, pro-consumer rights attitude, particularly when, at the time, the music industry tried hard to convince software companies of quite the opposite.

So, if he did change his mind, he must have changed it twice – first to appeal to the industry so he can launch the server in 2003, and, now in 2007, a second time to appeal to European consumer rights groups. Two possibilities are more likely: one, that both that interview and his current letter are PR speak and not his true, personal opinion. And two, that his opinion never did change, i.e. that he never did want to impose any DRM, or any enforced limitations of any kind. I could be reality-distorted, but I happen to find the latter more likely. We’re talking about his personal opinion, not about Apple’s company policy; he may be CEO, but he does get to have his on point of view that may or may not reflect his job. Consider, too, that he also worked at Pixar at the time (and still is strongly influential of it now), who is ultimately a content company; i.e., he would have reason enough not to make such consumer-friendly statements, and yet he did back then and does again now.

Second, some people validly point out that some artists and labels have requested from the iTunes team to have the DRM removed from their particular songs, i.e. they never wished to impose the encryption on their customers to begin with. The iTunes team, alas, refused to comply.

This one is admittedly a little strange. There are, however, a few misconceptions about the matter, so let’s first get down to that.

When artists or labels upload songs to be added to the iTunes Store, they typically use iTunes Producer, a simple application with an iTunes-like interface that focuses on entering metadata and then uploading in batches (perhaps quite a bit like Flickr Uploadr, if you will, except for songs instead of photos). It’s hard to find normal screenshots of it since the app is very specialized and thus not of interest to most people. Here’s one from a patent, which is why it’s black and white and quite low-quality, but you can make out the gist. You create your albums (they’re called “playlists” in the screenshot, but I think “albums” is a more fitting term here) to the left, then start putting tracks into each, put in all sorts of information and finally send it off. Here’s another screenshot with better quality, and with another section of the interface. You get the idea. (The app has also, of course, evolved over time; I remember seeing a slightly different layout.)

iTunes Producer also takes care of converting the items into the suitable format (for songs, that would be AAC), if you haven’t already done that. It’s important to note two things here: one, that you can do this conversion yourself, so you can actually pick your own bitrate, for instance, though very few songs take advantage of this. There are songs with much higher bitrate, and even with a completely different encoder than the one Apple provides. And two, and quite often misunderstood, no DRM is added at this time. It isn’t added by iTunes Producer, it isn’t added by yourself, and it isn’t added on the server side either. In fact, the files on the server aren’t encrypted at all.

The encryption comes in much later; as late as it gets. When you purchase and download a song, it gets downloaded as a file stream so you can’t easily tap in; once the download process is done, the iTunes progress bar switches from determinate (the above one) to indeterminate (the below one); this is where the encryption actually occurs. That is, the file gets loaded, then a DRM gets wrapped around it. On the client.

(With movies, this is slightly different. Steve specifically advertised the ability to watch while the movie is downloading; naturally, the above system wouldn’t allow for that as you shouldn’t be able to listen to the unencrypted version of the file. My understanding is that a movie is split into small chunks. After each is done, that part is encrypted, then playable, and so on. I.e., iTunes doesn’t start playing until at least one chunk is done and encrypted. I haven’t tested this extensively, though, but it seems the most sensible method.)

The reason I’m bringing iTunes Producer and the precise point of encryption up is as follows: Apple has all the files on the store in fully unencrypted, un”protected” form; they’re “perfectly normal”, if you will. So if they felt like getting into contract trouble, they could issue a client update and, at the very least, allow you to start purchasing songs without DRM immediately without any need for artists/labels to re-upload at all.

But more specifically, and this puts us back to the question, Apple could update iTunes Producer to let artists/labels specify on a per-song, per-album (”playlist”), per-artist or per-label basis whether they would like to opt out of DRM! Then, they could update iTunes to learn to reflect this setting and not encrypt downloads if the uploaders have chosen not to. Finally, it’s even possible that they could retroactively decrypt existing songs which have this set. I doubt they would do that, but it doesn’t sound all that far-fetched either.

One possibility of why Apple hasn’t done this is that the contract with the Big Four actually prevents them from doing so. I.e., they wouldn’t let Apple give indies different conditions of any form; it would have to be one and the same deal for everyone, especially since Apple was actually promoting iTunes with this argument: that you know the song price tag, know the limitations and know that it’s one and the same for every item. I don’t know if this is the case. If it is, Apple probably wouldn’t even be permitted to admit it.

Second, it’s also likely that the process I’ve delineated above is actually a lot more complicated than I assume it to be. I really don’t think there’s much to it; an opt-out checkbox on the uploading side, a “flag” column on the server/database item table side, and the ability for the client to reflect the flag’s setting. But then, we’re talking about a huge server network with huge amounts of data here, managed through third-party contracts with Akamai who have their own limitations and problems (which may, for instance, explain the strange 2 GBs limit iTunes appears to have for files on the store; one person reported this to me, anyhow). Of course even the slightest adjustment is bound to have consequences, especially when things don’t entirely follow plan, which is always the case with software, so I’m thinking in far too simple-minded terms. I’m certainly not agree with Jon’s assessment:

It should not take Apple’s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM.

This “not more than 2-3 days” to implement is a statistic that’s made up on the spot, with very little knowledge about the underlying system. I realize he has a lot of inside knowledge of FairPlay, but he doesn’t of the server architecture, which is what’s actually relevant here.

A final possibility brought up by some is that Apple would feel this “confuses” people; I do agree with Jon on this one:

This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.

The download process would hardly look any different. The file wouldn’t be “protected” any more, so its Kind column, etc. would differ, but it would still appear in the “Purchased” playlist. So, no, I don’t buy that this is Apple’s reasoning (if there is any at all).

I’m curious as to what, if any, the reasons are. Personally, I feel that it would have been a bombshell-kind finishing point to announce “To put my money where my mouth is, I am therefore announcing today that iTunes 7.1 will allow labels to choose on their own if they wish to have DRM on the songs they offer in our store”. It would have given the letter this final “he really means it” touch, and some, especially those who haven’t closely watched the person for years, certainly feel that that’s lacking. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time. Perhaps they’ve actually been preparing this, and were hoping to have it ready by the time Steve releases his letter. Maybe they waited to have the Beatles / Apple Records thing behind them, which they now do. Who knows, really!

The third matter: Sharing, or lack thereof. Sharing was introduced as part of iTunes 4.0 (as was the Store), and uses an Apple-developed protocol named DAAP, the Digital Audio Access Protocol. Some initially hoped that Apple would use something established like Shoutcast or Icecast. First, iTunes does support those for listening to streams; second, Apple also does offer an Icecast streaming server, as part of their Darwin Streaming Server project, or its closed-source QuickTime Streaming Server variant. Now, I wouldn’t mind for them to integrate a mini version of this into iTunes itself, but, third, DAAP is actually quite a different beast. Think of Shoutcast, Icecast and the like as “linear” streaming: the “host” defines the “playlist”, and maybe does some moderation (or even commercials) in between, much like a radio. The “listeners” just do that; they listen. There is no interactivity beyond pausing or switching to a different station altogether. DAAP is wholly different in this aspect; you share an entire library (or select playlists within), and you let the “listener” decide what song of yours they’d like to play next. This is not an implementation of “Internet radio”; it’s a way to let relatives, friends, or even yourself (on a different computer) access your own library. As a result, DAAP has actually been adopted by several major apps, both clients (such as VLC media player or, through a plug-in, Winamp, or even the Xbox, if you use Xbox Media Center) and servers (Wikipedia has a somewhat lacking list), so while there certainly are many cases of Apple suffering from NIH, this isn’t one of them.

On top of this, iTunes’s Sharing features was one of the first major adoptions of Bonjour (then called Rendezvous), Apple’s technique to let computers discover services of each other’s automatically, much like local-network file sharing services such as SMB, only on a more universal level. That is, if you happen to be in the same subnet as another computer running iTunes and having their library shared, this would let you see that library automatically; it would dynamically appear and disappear, which was particularly exciting on the then-increasing momentum of wireless networking. From what I understand, my brother used this feature a lot at university.

Unfortunately, one Planet GNOME blogger is correct to point out that Apple’s handling of this Sharing feature isn’t all rosy, and essentially hasn’t been from day one.

This started within days of 4.0.0’s release, when some people had the idiotic idea to abuse the feature to pirate songs off of each other. 4.0.0’s Advanced menu had a way to directly enter an IP address of another iTunes user, to connect to their library. This way, you could effectively download their songs and add them to your own library. If that sounds like an extremely inefficient way to steal compared to, oh I dunno, using a file sharing network, that’s because it is.

Unfortunately, the music industry apparently begged to differ and urged Apple to stop this junk, so 4.0.1 was quickly put out and removed this. Well, not really, since you can just set up a Bonjour bridge and still connect to a complete stranger’s library. But apparently, even those people realized how moronically cumbersome it would be to leverage this technique, so it never caught on, and Sharing started to be used, mostly, in fairly legitimate ways.

Or so Apple hoped (one would think). But for whatever reason, throughout the 4.x releases, more and more limitations were added to Sharing.

Let’s make this clear: DRM’d songs could not be copied this way anyway! Well yes, copied, but then the target computer would still have to authorize itself, so the DRM’s limitations (especially the “maximum amount of computers”) would not be compromised at all. I don’t know whether the music industry is boneheaded or just doesn’t care, but what 4.0.1 “fixed” didn’t really ever affect the Store-purchased songs to begin with, only songs without DRM, i.e. CD-ripped, pirated to begin with, or otherwise. Even, say, public domain material.

In any case, we’re at 7.0.2 now, and the Sharing feature is now needlessly crippled. Apple has also changed its protocol in 7.0, breaking compatibility with most aforementioned third-party apps, though some have already been fixed. This is all a shame. It’s a real shame. Apple needs to communicate clearly why the Sharing feature keeps being limited more and more, taking away from the whole idea of “sharing”. If it is due to the RIAA’s demands, we need the ability for content producers to flag their songs as “shareable” (see previous topic above).

Perhaps you sense a parallel: the Zune is running into similar trouble, only a lot worse. Its wireless sharing, which is one of the main features it actually has over the iPod, is so ridiculously limited that, once more, little is left from the original idea. Shared songs are always DRM-enclosed, even when they weren’t purchased at the Zune Marketplace, and even when the songs’ licenses conflict with DRM; cf. this article, for instance. The DRM’s stipulations are also that the songs are self-expiring after three plays or three days, whichever occurs first. I’m not putting this out to bash Microsoft, but to remind us all that iTunes’s Sharing should never, ever sink to this level, or even close.

To summarize, I think that what’s most prudent for Apple to address is why some of their decisions affect songs that either shouldn’t have DRM (e.g., from various indie labels), or don’t. This seems a very glaring architectural problem in iTunes, and I’m actually very pessimistic on Apple addressing it, as they’ve shown little interest in doing so. Perhaps Steve’s letter yesterday, which seemed completely out of the blue, means a change not necessarily in his personal opinion, but in where the company and its policies are headed, which is actually much better.

I lied, of course: it isn’t quite out of the blue. There was that thing with a few consumer rights groups in various countries of Europe.

Their goal: to give consumers more rights of what they can do with their songs. Sounds reasonable. The problems, though, are plentiful. Here’s a few:

First, they seem to act as if DRM is a sudden development. It has, in fact, been discussed and warned about for years, even well before the iTunes Store was ever announced.
Second, they single out Apple, which is neither fair nor in consumers’ interests. While the iTunes Store is by far the most popular one in terms of sales, there are many others, and most of them happen to have far stricter (read: much less consumer-friendly!) DRM terms.
Third, while Apple is ultimately the company the customer buys from, and while they have, of course, agreed with the industry’s terms, they are ultimately not the ones who asked for them, so shouldn’t the industry be the ones to be talked to, seeing as they wanted this whole mess to begin with?

But most important, and showing the hypocrisy (or incompetence, pick one) of these consumer rights group: DRM is legal! Why didn’t these consumer rights group do something when DMCA (October ‘99) and EUCD (May ‘01) happened? Why don’t they try and revert the process of implementing the EUCD across EU countries? Without EUCD, anyone could easily and legally decrypt any iTunes-purchased file, and allow exactly the thing these groups say they want to achieve: conversion to any other format. Right now, that’s technically possible, thanks to third-party hacks, but it’s illegal.

That is what the groups ought to be tackling: removing the legal basis of all this. The industry pushed these laws through, a small number of years before they actually became relevant, which is why there was so little outcry. Now that they do matter, nobody seems to remember that we, the people, have a tool at our hands to make DRM a lot less menacing to any of us: our elected legislators.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the groups will recognize this any moment soon, but perhaps they’ll take the hint from Steve’s letter to at least talk to the music industry as well, so they get some perspective of why Apple did thinks in their rather restrictive ways.

As for me, I’ll continue to buy some stuff on the Store. Not TV shows; they come a day late, they’re too pricey for the quality level they offer, and I watch each show once: I don’t want it archived, so I’d prefer a subscription model for that. Same, basically, for movies; rentals seems a far more suitable system in that regard. Songs, though, I do occasionally buy. The DRM does in fact not personally affect me at all (I simply do not need to play the songs on more than five computers, to play them on non-iPod portable players, or to convert them to a different format for any other reason, and I simply wouldn’t do any of that if they didn’t have the DRM), but I am wary that it one day might. It is a protection that isn’t in my favor, yet at my monetary cost and taking up space on my hard drive, so it should concern me; right now, though, it has no tangible effect on me. Still, the topic obviously interests and concerns me.

If there was one big thing I would like from the store, it’s to have two quality levels. In terms of songs, let me choose between (lossless) ALAC and the current 128 kbit/s AAC (perhaps throw MP3 or Vorbis in as a codec alternative), and in terms of TV shows and movies, let me choose between 720p AVC and the current slightly-below-480p AVC (lossless video isn’t gonna happen; even if it wasn’t for the content industry, it just wouldn’t be feasible to transport over the Internet). I don’t have a lot of space on my laptop, actually, but it would comfort me to know that I have the option to choose higher quality when I purchase something.

P.S.: the point that “Apple is profiting from the DRM as a means of lock-in to the iTunes+iPod model” has already been addressed by Steve in that a small percentage of an average iPod’s songs are actually purchased on iTunes, making it very unlikely that this would be a big reason for customers not to move to the competition. It has, despite that, been brought up again, but some people simply cannot read, and not only will I have to accept that; I’ll also have to assume that they wouldn’t read it if I were to write it either. Ergo, why waste time on it?

P.P.S.: is the industry starting to understand the problems (and ineffectiveness) of DRM themselves? One forum poster who claims to work for EMI says so.

As an employee of one of the “big 4″ labels, EMI - I can happily tell you that EMI are definately working towards this same goal. They’re currently trying to rid DRM off the CD’s we produce, and the likes of iTunes and other online stores will soon follow I am sure.