Steve Jobs certainly has the ear of the world. Anything he says is scrutinized and analyzed until his next public statement. On this surface, his latest statement, a lengthy open letter, requires no scrutiny. Jobs' message was clear: iTunes has DRM because the majors insist upon it, and they would drop -- "in a heartbeat" -- the DRM if the majors' licensing agreements allowed for it. The reasons behind the letter are less clear. That has lead to much commentary and analysis of the letter.

Apple may feel that an open format gives it a competitive advantage in some way. It wants to secure future growth. Or it wants interoperability-demanding European countries off its back and wants record labels to offer a fix. It could be a move to harm Microsoft's Zune before it gets off the ground. Jobs' open letter was not driven by some kind of idealism to build an open-format, digital music utopia. There were cold, calculating business reasons behind it.

Norway called out Apple, hinting that Jobs wanted the labels to bail him out of his problems with some European countries over interoperability issues. Senior advisor Torgeir Waterhouse feels Apple shouldn't wait for a label-endorsed open format in order for iTunes to achieve interoperability. "Our concern is of course that it's Apple and [the] iTunes Music Store [that] should be addressing the issue of record companies and DRM themselves if it needs to be addressed - and as we've stated earlier it's iTunes Music Store that's providing a service to the consumers and therefore has the responsibility to offer up a consumer friendly product."

An errant statistic reveals an underlying theme of the open letter: Jobs wants consumers to think the major labels are controlling them. The four majors, wrote Jobs, control 70% of the world's music. That's far from the truth, of course. The majors account for 70% of sales. The vast majority of music is produced by smaller labels or independent artists -- and most of them aren't pleased about the DRM placed on their songs at iTunes.

Additional reading:

• Forbes.com: "It Jobs Making Nice With Europe?" "Europe is a key market for Apple. The company's net sales in the region of the iPod, Macintosh computers and other products totaled $1.71 billion in the first fiscal quarter of 2007 (which ended Dec. 31), surging 38% from the same period a year earlier. Europe accounted for 24% of Apple's sales last quarter and its growth rate outstripped those of other markets."
• Jupiter's David Card: "Jobs Says: Let My Music Free!" "Who needs lock-in when you have 70% market share? And there is no lock-in because only something like 6% to 20% of the songs on iPod users' devices comes from the iTunes store. Not the 3% Jobs gets from over-simplified arithmetic (a ton of iPods are upgrades, and only about half of device owners buy any digital music at all)."
• Forrester's Josh Bernoff: "Steve Jobs' brilliant strategic move: kill DRM" "More stores means more iPod sales. Apple makes its money from iPods far more than iTunes. Killing DRM will open up any store to sell music for iPods."