DRM-free can play on almost anything and is paired with higher-quality, too
In a conference call at 1pm today, EMI's Eric Nicoli and Apple's Steve Jobs announced a new era in downloadable music, kicking off with the entire EMI catalogue becoming immediately available without any copy-protection restrictions.
So what has Steve Jobs got to do with EMI dropping digital rights management? Only that Apple’s iTunes store will be the first online music store to provide the new DRM-free music from EMI.
But you have to ask why the sudden change, when Apple itself has long been such keen proponents of DRM music?
It appears that both Apple and EMI have started listening to what consumers want and the fact that their unhappy at having their music 'handcuffed' to one device or PC. As well as dropping DRM from tracks, EMI is encoding it at double the bit-rate - 256Kbps - for improved quality over the 128Kbps originals, as an added incentive to pay a little extra for DRM-free music.
As we all know, DRM-free music can go anywhere and since we, the users, can go anywhere, Apple and EMI have finally seen the light and will let us take our music with us, on any device we choose.
This is all good news but what about pricing and what about all the music we've already bought that's got DRM stamped all through it?
More good news here. Any EMI music you already bought through the iTunes store can be upgraded to higher-quality (256kbps AAC), DRM-free versions for 20p (30 US cents) a tune.
The new DRM-free, 256Kbps tracks will be available for 99p ($1.29), compared with 79p (99 cents) for the original copy-protected, 128Kbps AAC tracks, though these are still available to download.
Looking to the future, Apple is hoping to get more labels on-board with DRM-free music. If it succeeds, then the rest of these bloody great corporations will finally have come to their senses and at last understood that we are happy to pay for our music but get humpy when we can't do what we want with it once we have it.
Now, if Apple can just update my iPod firmware so I can drag and drop without having to re-encode or use some third-party software, I'll be a very happy camper.
But what about you? Let us know in the HEXUS.community how you feel about this breakthrough.
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