Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
Jobs' letter sounds very nice, but before it there were reports from several indie labels who asked to sell their music without DRM and were refused. So it's not all the labels' fault.
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The issue there was that Apple refused to do anything special for smaller labels. Their announcement of the iTunes music store basically went (paraphrasing here): "For the independent labels... we can't afford to negotiate separately with each of you, so we're offering you a simple deal -- take it or leave it. You get
exactly the same terms as the major labels. Period."
I took the trouble to send in a query to Apple on this very issue back then. Apple responded -- to some random software developer (me), not even someone in the music business! -- saying basically that they weren't prepared to deal with labels individually so the little guys would have the same DRM as the big guys. They claimed to understand that many independent labels might want their music to be DRM free, but their deal with the
big labels actually required that they put everyone in under identical terms.
By the time of the Jobs letter on DRM, Apple had enough clout in the music business to be able to allow DRM-free offerings. But that wasn't in the cards at the beginning.
Xenophon