When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do.
The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks.
As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music.
Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value switching cost. I wonder how many of the increasingly ubiquitous iPod users even know that they can’t easily take their songs to a non-Apple product.
I expect that before long there will be court cases for Apple to display disclaimers on their products saying that they cannot move songs to a non-Apple environment, or cases to legitimize software that bypasses Apple’s DRM and converts songs to regular MP3.
By the time that these have dragged through the courts, Apple will have won. But the real irony is that it won’t be file sharing advocates pushing these cases, but the recording industry.
Apple holds the cards precisely because it and not the recording industry, controlls the DRM.