Alex Salkever’s latest Byte of the Apple column in BusinessWeek Online contains excerpts from an interview Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who talked about Apple’s success with its new iTunes Music Store, its marketing efforts with iPods, Digital Rights Management and more.
Schiller said that Apple isn’t looking at iTunes Music Store as “a stand-alone business,” but rather as part of the company’s continued digital-life strategy. Schiller hopes that the iTunes Music Store will drive more iPod sales, both from existing Mac users and Windows customers.
Music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store can be played on up to three Macs, can be burned an unlimited amount of times to CD, and can also be stored on an unlimited number of registered iPods. Part of what makes that happen is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology called FairPlay — it’s a system-level technology integrated into iTunes and QuickTime.
Calling Apple’s securing of “a broad set of rights” to the music it sells through the iTunes Music Store “a landmark,” Schiller said “[Apple’s] goal is to make it transparent for the user so that they never have to think about DRM.”
Schiller said that Apple doubts that technical or legislative maneuvers will make piracy go away. “In the end, the solution will be a behavioral one. Many people will choose the legal and fair route. That’s what we hope we’ve done here — create something that’s in many ways better than the free services,” he said.
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