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Other than putting a public-consciousness ki-bosh on his stock options scandal, Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Music" marks a strange departure — and not because he's turning against DRM. This is the New Steve, and free music aside, it's something of an off-putting change.

Jobs used to be all about mystique; despite his accomplished hucksterism, his personal and organizational opacity was a welcome counterpoint to the far more common transparency addiction now infecting the industry. Unfortunately, he's recently started behaving more like a typical tech company CEO, i.e. hyping unfinished products like the iPhone and AppleTV. Now we have grandiose pronouncements coming down from the temple mount to liberate us all from the chains of intellectual property prison. Is Jobs just a plebe-happy partisan who wants bottom-up change? Or has he lost patience with cracking his own contractual shackles in regular dealings with record companies, and so seeks an end run via grassroots groundswell? It doesn't really matter, because once New Steve sees how much attention "Thoughts on Music" garnered, you can bet that his "Thoughts" will get a regular airing whenever someone else's thoughts are proving an inconvenience. Come back, Old Steve. Still, at least Fake Steve Jobs is thinking too — he suggests that the best solution to the DRM problem is to cease using iTunes, stop buying iPods, and cease purchasing music altogether.