Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.
But Steam games do work straight away on your computer, iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player everybody had. It's not like you could do something about it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one.
And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the legal music and then download a DRM removal software from some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that might existed at the time, I don't remember), well that's even more hassle than piracy.
Even Apple themselves noticed the problem but a little too late, by then Spotify was already starting to spread.
Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music software just as much as every PC can support something like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
As much iPods were a commercial success, they were absolutely dwarfed more than 10 to 1 by the number of standard mp3 players and those could not read DRM music at all. Out of my whole high school, you only had maybe one or two guys with a real iPod and thousands of mp3 players. They were much cheaper to buy and even easier to use.
And not sure why you bring smartphones, by the time modern smartphones were popular in the 2010s, people were using Spotify already.
> The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
Music piracy is at its lowest now it has ever been since the 80s.
