Steve Jobs was in town today (London) and the rumour mill had it that he was here to announce the availability of the Beatles back catalogue online. It wasn't that, however it was more importantly news that EMI (as suspected to be fair) is going to be the first of the Majors to take the DRM off their music they sell through iTunes (or at least for 'premium' material). What does that mean? as far as the UK goes:
79p/$0.99/€0.99/ single track- with drm and at 128kbps quality
99p/$1.29/€1.29 single track- no drm and 256kbps quality
Album prices unchanged with no drm and all at 256kbps quality
Well done EMI. Great news for album buyers (as no price increase) and even for those single track buyers, the quality will be doubled. Of course, the true way to go is the way of our russian friends as far as choice in format/quality goes, but this is a welcome start. At least they have decided not to take the blanket approach that all their customers and potential customers are music pirates (at long last).
The question now is will EMI licence sites such as eMusic (if they wanted access to their catalogue) to sell their drm free music as part of their subscription bundles?? I would guess not - for now.
Now once the rest of the majors follow suit (and they all will within 2007) we can then start to to address the issue of price, which still need to fall in relation to the cost of a CD (with all the additional value, cover-art, liner notes, lyrics and other info that is still mostly lacking for download versions costing almost as much and at far inferior sound quality)
Click here to listen to an audio webcast of the announcement press conference with EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and click here for the press release and photos
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