Steve Jobs has writ­ten an open let­ter to the music indus­try, posit­ing that the best thing for the labels, con­sumers and music player man­u­fac­tur­ers is to abol­ish DRM alto­gether:

The third alter­na­tive is to abol­ish DRMs entirely. 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. If the big four music com­pa­nies would license Apple their music with­out the require­ment that it be pro­tected with a DRM, we would switch to sell­ing only DRM-​​free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-​​free music.

I’ve posted on DRM here at acid­labs before (here, here and here), so my anti-​​DRM posi­tion is well known. In effect, my posi­tion is that DRM is futile rather than evil. It doesn’t ulti­mately work. Music piracy is endemic, which is tak­ing dol­lars out of the pock­ets of musi­cians who richly deserve every dol­lar they can earn from the fruits of their labors.

This, how­ever is major news and breaks new ground. I only hope that the heavy­weight that is His Steve­ness can con­vince the labels to change their model. The let­ter is being widely reported in the blo­gos­phere (TechCrunch, Tech­meme), and has even made the main­stream media (ABC News, The Aus­tralian).