iTunes Online Store, Now With Freedom
Apple’s iTunes store is one of the most significant e-commerce projects on the ‘net, and anyone in the business should pay close attention to what they do. Next to Amazon, they’re probably the largest online merchant. Certainly one of the most successful, selling over a billion songs in its first year of operation, and causing a major shake-up of the music industry.
The big news is that they just overcame a major hurdle in dealing with one of the big record companies (EMI): they are now offering DRM-free music files for sale.
iTunes broke all of the rules when it came to the 80/20 rule, and was a major focus point in Chris Anderson’s famous book on Internet economics, The Long Tail.
To quote Anderson:
Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.
When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed … our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches … technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the “infinite shelf-space effect”–the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.
With the staggering weight of the Long Tail Internet marketplace behind it, Apple has leaned on record companies to remove the restrictive copyright projection technology built into their music files, so that iTunes could offer it’s customers what they’ve been asking for: music files that they are free to copy and move around as they see fit.
DRM has never fit into the ethos of the Internet, especially as it evolves into Web 2.0, where sharing, integrating, mashing-up, and openness are the community values. Many people who understand DRM know that it is defective by design, and as such would never shop at iTunes. Now they can, at least, for EMI music. Bravo Apple!