Just read this morning on Daring Fireball that Universal has decided to go DRM-free in its online distribution - with the exception of iTunes. Real, Walmart, Amazon and Google will have exclusivity over Apple. To which, Gruber retorts:

Um, Universal won’t sell DRM-free music through iTunes because they don’t like Apple’s DRM? WTF? Am I even supposed to pretend this makes sense?

As I see it, there are two reasons behind this decision:

First, as spelled out in the article, it’s a (weak) attempt by Universal to break Apple’s position with iTunes. Further, we already are well aware of the immaturity of the people in power of the recording industry. They can’t take all their “toys” (regular music downloads) away from Apple (as it would be a catastrophic negative impact on their total sales), but they can certainly choose to not share their newest, shiniest “toy” (DRM-free downloads) - the “toy” that they know Apple wants.

But another thing that struck me in the article was:

The offer of Universal’s music under the new terms is being framed as a test, to run into January, allowing executives to study consumer demand and any effect on online piracy.

If they’re just running the test on the laggards of the music digital sales venues (e-tailers), they’ve got a great opportunity to fix the results as a disappointment and reason to not go further with offering DRM-free downloads. If, say, 20% of your total download sales comes from Real, Walmart, Amazon and Google combined and you know that only a fraction of that 20% will jump at the opportunity to go DRM-free for whatever reason (ignorance, potential price difference, poor positioning by the e-tailers, whatever), then you are guaranteed a poor percentage result of your total digital music sales and an easy out in declining to continue DRM-free sales.

But, if something happens and a good portion of the 80% sales on iTunes shifts to these other e-tailers, well hey - added bonus of breaking Apple’s dominance! Too bad that the industry has such a bad track-record on foresight…