By Ryan Olson

Set music free, Steve Jobs said.

It’s a refrain that echoes loudly through a long missive dubbed “Thoughts on Music,” featured prominently on Apple’s web site Tuesday. In the document, the technology CEO asks the world’s four largest music companies to abolish the cumbersome copy-protection scheme associated with music sold via iTunes and other online stores.

Specifically naming Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI, Mr. Jobs discussed the current state of the digital music industry and Apple in particular, saying that the abolishment of digital rights management (DRM) schemes could lead to the arrival of new companies, music stores, and even music players.

“DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy,” Mr. Jobs said, pointing to the fact that the more than 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs sold by his company mean an average of 22 songs per iPod had been purchased from iTunes. With most iPods nearly full of songs, Mr. Jobs said, that means more than 90 percent of the music on an average player is DRM-free—meaning it came from somewhere else. “iPod users are clearly not locked onto the iTunes store,” Mr. Jobs said in his lengthy message.

The CEO added that licensing DRM technology such as that found in iTunes is also an unrealistic option because of possible problems associated with a greater likelihood of copy protection schemes being leaked and ultimately broken.

The majority of music sold each year is still in physical formats like CDs that can be easily copied, uploaded to the Internet, and swapped illegally. “No DRM system was ever developed for the CD,” Mr. Jobs said, because companies depend on revenue from the sale of CDs purchased for use in music players without copy-protection schemes. Because of that reason, DRM-enabled CDs aren’t likely to show up anytime soon, he said.

So DRM systems offer no real benefit to music companies, Mr. Jobs concluded. In fact, the technical expertise and cost associated with their creation, operation, and maintenance has likely limited the number of participants able to sell such music. Creating a DRM-free music marketplace offering true interoperability, he said, is something the company will embrace “wholeheartedly.”