EMI goes DRM free on iTunes

I know I just posted about it. But check it out, EMI really went and did it:

EMI Music is launching DRM-free superior quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire and that Apple’s iTunes Store will be the first online music store to sell EMI’s new downloads.

That is huge news that I honestly wasn’t expecting any time soon. I hope this gives pause to all those Steve Jobs haters who were all “Steve’s just blowing hot air, he’ll never drop DRM, he loves the lock in.” Yeah, I can’t wait to read Fake Steve Jobs today.

I hope this does well for EMI and iTunes and that more music follows suit. Something that I hope happens more or less immediately is allowing the indie (indy?) labels who wanted their music DRM free to get their wish. I’m already ready to go buy some Madness and Deep Purple albums.

I was looking at this some more, wondering about how they were going to handle the user interface aspect of this, that being the key reason people cited for Apple’s inability to offer different types of music on iTunes.

Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price.

It’s kind of wierd, actually offering two different ways to purchase the same songs but not change the album price. I wonder if they’ll handle it the way they do with “clean” vs. “explicit” versions of songs and add a “drm-free” or “enhanced sound” bug to songs. Oh well, in any event it is all good times.

UPDATE: Check out techcrunch to see some of the slides from the conference call.

Apr 2nd, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: apple · the love