Steve Jobs has never been a normal CEO. He’s best known for running Apple, of course, but that hasn’t stopped him from starting up enormous side projects like NeXT and Pixar. He’s now the single largest individual shareholder in Disney, and probably has more clout there than most executives.
Even Jobs can’t control companies in which he has no job and no ownership, though, right? Wrong. It turns out that all he needs to do is write a letter, as he did back on February 6, expressing the heresy that music companies should sell online the same thing that they sell as CDs: unprotected music. And presto, less than two months later, that’s exactly what’s happened.
It seems that EMI’s Eric Nicoli did get one concession out of Jobs: the unprotected music will cost $1.29 per song, rather than 99 cents for the protected music. In order to make it seem as though you’re not just paying for the lack of DRM, the audio quality will be higher: the unprotected music will be 256kbps, as opposed to 128kbps for the current iTunes inventory.
One piece of good news: You don’t need to buy your music all over again if you want it unencrypted — you can just pay the difference of 30 cents per song. (This is a bit like the recent “complete my album” announcement.)
And one piece of bad news: According to the announcement transcript from CrunchGear, there’s still no sign of any Beatles tracks on iTunes.
Note: NeXT was started after Steve Jobs was booted from Apple. And he returned to Apple when Apple bought NeXT.
Pixar he was more of a hand’s-off CEO, more of a principle owner/financer. And his role at Disney is because Disney bought Pixar.
So the answer is “two”, at any given time.
Also, note that its really REALLY clever. It’s “DRM Free” but its still in apple’s proprietary AAC format, so they still get the lock in effect, its just no longer compulsory (you can convert formats, but that takes effort).
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding, aka MPEG-4’s audio format) isn’t proprietary. Any recent player, as well as most mobile phones, can play AAC.