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Apple's chief executive officer Steve Jobs has called on record companies to remove electronic protection from digital music.

Writing on the company's website Mr Jobs replied to recent criticism that called for his company's iTunes store to open up the digital rights management (DRM) system so that music purchased from the website could be used on any digital media player.

But the Apple chief said that the future of most of the rights for music in Apple's online stores lies with the industry "big four" – Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, and not online sellers like iTunes.

He says the big four should abolish the DRM system because it has not worked "and may never work to halt music privacy", and Apple would fully support a philosophy where online music can be downloaded and used on any player available to consumers.

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats," wrote Mr Jobs. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players."

Mr Jobs claims that the DRM system has failed because while online music is protected, record companies still sell billions of CDs every year without copy protection that can be imported onto a computer and distributed online.

"In 2006, under two billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves," he wrote.