Free Music
Jobs wrote a nice letter on why I don’t buy music from the iTunes store. Sounds like most other people don’t either.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
Now how much off that non-DRM’ed music came from their friends’ CD collection or BitTorrent?
Sounds like Jobs wants to sell more music on iTunes. Is DRM really what is stopping people from buying music on iTunes? Or are kids just not buying as many albums anymore?