Apple Introduces the Innovative iTunes Music Store and Sets Off a Tornado of Imitators

There’s a line in Rob Reiner’s “The American President” when President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) takes to the press room podium after recognizing several political and personal realities. At one point he says of his political opponent, “Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it.”

In the case of the music industry, they don’t get it and they can’t sell it.

Sales of CDs have dropped off, and the Internet has allowed music lovers to type in a URL and download any song, or hundreds of songs, without paying a center. The music industry has cried “Foul!”, has gone to court, has threatened lawsuits, and more recently has served ISPs with subpoenas to find out who is downloading songs.

The music industry, and by that I mean the big music companies, simply fails to realize that the world has pressed on beyond the world of long-playing records (LPs), 8-track cassetttes and, yes, even CDs. The world has moved on to the digital age, and digital thinking. The availability of free data, in all forms, is something that will never be put back in the bottle. Anyone under 25 now using a computer thinks differently (no pun intended), and those younger than 25 will have even most vastly different ideas about the source and value of data. Heck, even 50 year-olds are starting to think differently.

So some forward-thinking people decided to come up with an on-line music site. They put together a Web site, obtained the rights to license music, and started taking orders. But they were just doing the same thing the music companies have been doing for decades, and then using the Web only to automate the money-taking process. The restrictions were the same–you’re either renting the music for a period of time, and paying a monthly fee to do so, or you were seriously limited in how you could hear the music, burn it to CDs or transfer it to anyone or anything else (like an iPod).

And then Steve Jobs started thinking about it. He figured it out: the Internet only makes the music easier to obtain. It doesn’t offer any other “lifestyle” advantages. What you would really have to do was change the was the music is licensed. That would be the sea-change.

And so he lobbied the Big 5 music companies for reasonable rights to their music. Invisible rights that music buyers would never even notice if they used the music according to common behaviors. Buy it, download it, play it from the computer, burn a couple of CDs, transfer it to your iPod. You’ll never bump into any restrictions with an Apple-downloaded song.

And yet other companies still don’t get it. They’ve come up with “competitive” Web sites selling music, but they’re loaded with all sorts of restrictions on the purchase, or just extend the “rental” concept.

Apple’s use of the Internet wasn’t the key. It’s the rights management. It’s always been about rights management, and finding the appropriate balance between allowing free use of purchased songs, and the reasonable need to pay the artists for their music.

“Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.” Now that I think of it, that’s pretty much how the music industry is operating.

The sooner the music industry realizes that no one is ever going back to the “old time” thinking about obtaining music, the sooner they’ll begin collecting those 99 cents. Get on board, guys.