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If this ends up becoming an industry trend it has some interesting repercussions for the music distribution industry. The combination of a compact disc's unenc

If this ends up becoming an industry trend it has some interesting repercussions for the music distribution industry. The combination of a compact disc's unencrypted contents plus an optical CD drive in almost every computer really helped push the ubiquity of digital music unencumbered by DRM. To consumers any DRM system seemed like a bigger hassle than dropping a CD in the drive, ripping the bits and then converting them to MP3s. We're years away from this, but if a majority of computers don't have an optical drive to rip CDs then the average consumer loses this non-download path to digital music. That probably emboldens DRM advocates, helps Apple's music download business, and will effect countless other things that are hard/impossible to predict.

derefr 16y ago
The only reason Apple would consider this is that iTMS is already such a large part of the music distribution market (and likewise iTMS+Netflix for movie distribution) that their user-base doesn't put real plastic discs into computers much at all any more. I bet the ratio for the average Mac user of iTMS songs+movies downloaded, to CDs+DVDs ripped, has been on a steady decline for years, and when they do this it's because they'll have decided that it's finally crossed some inflection point. By the time Macs ship universally without optical drives, the idea of getting music off of a CD and onto your computer will be as backwards-seeming as getting video off of a VHS and onto a DVD. Sure, it's possible, and you might want to do it for things with sentimental value and out-of-print oldies, but in both cases it's way easier to just bring your old tapes (discs) to a media shop whose service include conversions, than it would be to find the equipment to do it on your own.