An Apple Press release brings good news.
In January 2007, I whined in my article, “CDs vs. Downloads” about the inconvenience of dealing with DRM in my music. I said that I’d gotten to the point where I’d rather just buy a CD and rip it to iTunes than buy from the iTunes music store. I didn’t like the restrictions Apple put on the music to make the music industry happy.
Steve Jobs later wrote an essay about the DRM situation “Thoughts on Music,” in which he proposed an end to DRM for downloaded music.
Was he preparing us for Apple’s latest announcement?
From Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store on Apple.com:
Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
Holy cow! Not only does this make the iTunes Music Store a more attractive place to buy music, but it’s a great way to suck another 30¢ per EMI song sold from previous customers. Idiots like me who have downloaded over 500 songs since the iTunes Music Store went online years ago. (That’s got to do good things for my Apple stock.)
The big question now is this: will the other music publishers follow suit? Or will they attempt to push through the Microsoft model — you know, the one where Microsoft pays them for every Zune sold?
It should be interesting to watch how this develops.
