I've got a new feature article up on Salon today, talking about what I think Steve Jobs's music DRM memo really means. I've been asked to talk about this subject everywhere I've been for weeks now, so when Salon asked me if I wanted to write about it at length, I jumped at the chance.
Although Apple's DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying, it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a competing device. Every iTunes song you buy for 99 cents amounts to a 99 cent tax on switching from an iPod to a Zune. That's because your iTunes songs won't play on your Zune — or on any other player, save those made or licensed by Apple. Jobs tries to skate around this in his memo, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of the music on iPods comes from his music store, and so the anti-switching effects are minimal.
While it's true that most of us haven't loaded our 10,000-song iPods with $9,900 worth of iTunes songs, it doesn't follow that the switching cost for even casual iTunes customers is negligible. If you'd bought just one iTunes track every month since the launch in 2003, you'd have rung up $82 in lock-in music. Throw in a couple of $9.99 albums and maybe an audiobook or two and you can easily find yourself in $150 down the lock-in hole.
That's $150 you kiss goodbye if you buy a sexy little Creative Labs Zen or a weird little no-name from the wildly imaginative entrepreneurs of Malaysia. Not only won't your iTunes Store music play on those devices, it's illegal to try to get it to play on those devices.
