ReadWriteWeb

Here at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Neil Young just announced that his whole life's work will be made available on in a dynamically updating collection delivered on Blu-ray disk. After his Keynote announcement I was fortunate enough to participate in a small group interview with a handful of other bloggers. Young offered interesting replies to questions about Trent Reznor and music piracy, about MP3 sound quality and about the way the web enables his extensive work on electric cars.

On the same day that Apple announced that iTunes had surpassed Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the United States, MySpace announced that it had joined with three of four major labels (EMI isn't on board yet) to launch their own iTunes killer. As they did previously for Amazon, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG have agreed to let MySpace sell music DRM-free. But the big question is: Why just the majors?

With the high profile launch this week of Qtrax, a free and legal P2P music offering (ReadWriteWeb coverage), ad-supported music downloads are very much in the spotlight, and as always RWW network blog last100 has its finger on the pulse, with great news coverage and analysis of the week that was in digital music, including an exclusive interview with the CEO of a large ad-supported music web site.

A couple of weeks ago, I surmised that because Apple enjoys a dominating end-to-end position in the digital music market, most consumers are never really affected by the DRM restrictions they impose -- if users are buying music to play on their iPods, then they don't really come in contact with the DRM. If consumers aren't bothered by DRM, or perhaps not even aware that it exists, will "no DRM" resonate as a marketing message? Recently released sales data seems to suggest so.

A lot of things happened in 2007 that seemed to threaten Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market. Microsoft launched its new Zune MP3 players, which received mostly glowing reviews, and they kept their installed user base happy with major firmware updates for old players. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a major DRM-free MP3 download service at a cut-rate (compared to Apple's). But generally, the facts still point to Apple dominance for awhile to come.