‘BusinessWeek’: Apple stoke digital music standards war
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 5, 2007 at 2:11pm
Apple’s recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher’s catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod’s AAC format as the industry standard, Arik Hesseldahl writes in a “Byte of the Apple” column for BusinessWeek Online.
“The accord marks a fundamental change in the digital music landscape, a feat Apple is pulling off with increasing regularity of late,” he writes. “If I were an employee of Microsoft and involved with its confusing digital-music efforts, built around its highly DRM-protected WMA format, I’d be sweating right now. But one of the truly remarkable aspects of the pact is how Apple is pulling it off. Having floated the rhetorical trial balloon for selling unprotected music files via iTunes in his landmark essay ‘Thoughts on Music,’ Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs in hindsight appears to have been deliberately ambiguous about the file format he preferred. It’s now clear why. He didn’t mean selling unprotected MP3s, but unprotected AAC songs. The decision will have important long-term effects, especially as more labels follow EMI’s lead.”
Hesseldahl says that using AAC is brilliant for several reasons. One is that, for Apple, whose stated market aim is to do everything in its power to sell more of its highly profitable iPods (and beginning in June, presumably profitable iPhones), the choice of AAC means more non-Apple devices will be able to play songs purchased on iTunes, he says. Another is that having stripped the iPod-only restrictions, at least from the EMI catalog, on iTunes means there is even less shackling an iTunes customer to the iPod than before, which may help Apple fight off the antitrust complaints of European regulators.
“But the real target is Microsoft,” Hasseldahl writes. “What we now have is a good old-fashioned standards war heating up, and it is pitting the old foes Apple and Microsoft against each other once again. Saying Apple has the upper hand is giving Microsoft more credit than it deserves.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
