I don’t want to sound like a just another sound-reflecting plate in the echo chamber… so, I’ll keep this post short. But, this one section of Steve Jobs’s recent announcement to drop Apple’s “FairPlay” DRM is too juicy to ignore.

Jobs breaks down why Apple does not currently have its customers locked in by DRM, and it is interesting commentary on the digital music e-commerce market:

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

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. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

There are a few statistical fallacies in this arguement, but even if you assume them all to fall in favor of Apple adoption, Apple still has incredibly little traction in grand scheme of digital music, and yet, Apple is the leader in digital music e-commerce (4x bigger than the closest competitor, eMusic)! This shows that the digital music e-commerce space on whole is pretty poor. Very interesting.