So the big fuss lately in the music world is the slight hope that music companies may finally give up on the idea of DRM when it comes to music purchased on the internet. According to this open letter by Steve Jobs published today Apple is all for ditching DRM making music purchased on iTunes or anywhere else playable on all digital music players. A couple of very interesting stats are provided:

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. [...] In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

In theory the idea of DRM has always made business sense and made an easy sell to companies with products that could be sold and transmitted over the internet. In practice its almost always a different case. Remember the good ol days?