Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman became the first representative of the Big 4 to publicly respond to Apple CEO Steve Jobs's open letter earlier this week calling for an end to Digital Rights Management on music files. According to The Financial Times, Bronfman slammed Jobs's proposal at meeting of Warner investors, saying that it was "completely without logic or merit." Warner and the other three members of the Big 4 will be negotiating with Apple to renew the iTunes contract in a few months; Bronfman feels that "manifestos in advance of those discussions are counter-productive."

Although the Big 4 are upset about how little money they get from selling digital music when compared to the big profits Apple pulls in from the iPod, in the end, ending DRM won't be a function of how much money each side wants to pull from the digital music pie - it'll be how resistant the Big 4 are to change. It's obvious from a cursory glance at the system that DRM is by its very nature clunky, because it opens up the consumer to confusion and annoyance when seemingly arbitrary limits appear on how the consumer can use the music s/he purchased. Removing that system will mean good things for the digital music industry, which is, according to the same FT article, starting to slow down. However, by choosing to hold on to this antiquated system that punishes legal users as much as potential pirates, the Big 4 is playing to their usual role of being too big and too slow to understand that they are the source of their own problems.

Take CDs, for example. The average CD retailer sells new CDs at $16+ in the United States, a price that exceed the older (and more complicated to make/operate) cassette tape...and the price has never really gone down in the 20+ years of CD's existence. With alternative methods of music delivery (like the Internet) available, CD sales started to go down a few years ago...but the Big 4 can't seem to figure out that keeping CD prices high is contributing to the problem. Given their reaction to Jobs's proposal, it sounds like they still haven't figured out what they're doing wrong.