>until the courts forced them to remove it

Citation needed. Steve Jobs was incredibly anti-DRM and it was only added because the content owners wouldn't license the music to Apple without it. Once the iTunes Store exploded and became a primary sales channel, Apple renegotiated their licenses and required all media to be DRM-free because, at that point, they had the upper hand.

That’s not at all what happened.

Around the end of 2006, the music industry was complaining that no other music store could compete with iTunes because the DRM wasn’t compatible. They wanted Apple to license FairPlay to competitors.

Apple refused and Jobs posted his famous “Thoughts on Music” letter on the front page of Apple’s website where he said that if the music industry wanted interoperability, they could license music to everyone DRM free and there would be interoperability. Especially since all physical music was already DRM free.

https://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-though...

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

There was some haggling back and forth about terms. The music industry wanted variable pricing, to be able to sell more music as a whole album and a cut of each iPhone sold. Apple refused all of their demands.

The other stores acquiesced and were able to sell DRM music before Apple. However EMI and some independent labels did agree from day one.

Two years later all of the music labels came to terms with Apple and allowed it to sell music directly on the phone over the cellular network.

During that same era, Apple's slogan for the iPod was, notoriously: "Rip. Mix. Burn."

They were the first company to crack the nut of digital music sales, and getting those deals with the recording industry absolutely required DRM at the time.

> During that same era, Apple's slogan for the iPod was, notoriously: "Rip. Mix. Burn."

So the argument that Apple didn’t outcompete Sony on marketing rests on a marketing slogan from 20 years ago?

That slogan makes pretty clear to me what Apple’s priorities were and had been all along - put the customer’s needs at the forefront of their positioning.

Apple actually had a product for this too (itunes), which integrated with the ipod, and allowed you to seamlessly rip your existing CD collection and sync it to your ipod in one relatively simple piece of software. You can tell how important this was by the fact that apple produced a windows version of itunes.

I believe CD ripping software was relatively niche before that due to legal concerns. I don't think it was just marketing.

I bought an iPod in that era, and didn't buy a single DRMed song -- ripped all my CDs, that was more than enough. If you look at iTunes revenue vs iPod sales, most people did what I did. Sony didn't support that. And the smaller companies that pioneered ripping+mp3 players had less-attractive products and interfaces.

You don’t have to guess. Jobs himself said in his famous “Thoughts on Music” essay that only 3% of music on iPods were bought from iTunes.

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

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.

Ipod+rip in the west, was probably equivalent to cd rentals + minidisc "single digital copy" of Japan.

Sony wanted to keep the minidisk ATRAC codec (arguably much better than mp3, unfortunately while mp3 became ubiquitous despite patents, ATRAC never did) along with the draconic drm.

I lived a year in Japan in 1997-98 - I recall a fellow high school student had racks upon tracks of "pirated" MDs at home. It was a similar price model to streaming; less pr cd/disk, but "at least something" - as everyone would rent a CD and buy a blank mini-disk - and rip at home. No digital/lossless copy from a copied MD to a blank.

Classic example of the west being slow at adapting some tech, then "jumping" to the next (here, using a computer to rip cds, not dedicated hw, like an MD deck and cd player, linked via digital coax/optical cable). And then skipping cd rentals in favour of first pirated music, then streaming. Much helped by by free software like Winamp that AFAIK ignored the licensing on mp3 in most cases.

The iPods were certainly helped by mp3 file-sharing - that probably wouldn't have happened if they could only play back aac or whatever - if they weren't mp3 players not merely music players.

You should probably blame the music labels (for example, Columbia/Sony) for the DRM.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....