This morning (at 5 o’clock in the morning local time - gah! ), Apple and EMI held a joint press conference. As many have speculated, the topic of it was the release of a subset of the EMI catalog without any DRM. There will be a 30 cent premium on a DRM free song, but it is also offered in higher quality (256kbps) as opposed to the old, DRM’ed, AAC protected songs.
Apple is going to let users “upgrade” existing songs to DRM-free if they pay the 30-cent premium - which raises the interesting question if a “re-download” for lost files can be far behind. To allow this, and the “complete my album” feature Apple recently introduced, they need to keep track of files you own anyways. Albums, by the way, can be upgraded for free - an interesting way to reward loyalty in the fan base.
The part that makes me most happy about this, apart from having DRM-free music? It smacks the perpetual copyright whiners like Cory Doctorow ( “I doubt Jobs’ sincerity. I suspect he likes DRM because it creates an anti-competitive lock-in to Apple.” ) right over the head. I’ve been tired of the copyright issue being made into some sort of holy war against the commercialist infidel pigs for quite some time, and this news bit shows that there is genuine interest in a non-DRM world from at least some companies. That attitude of mine might of course be related to the fact that I make games, and copyright helps me to actually make money, so take me with a grain of salt…
Still, good news overall. Music without a DRM burden (which, coincidentally, deals a big blow to Zune Sharing and Vista’s content protection) for a slightly higher price is a deal I can live with. Next thing we need is serious competition in the music market, and let’s see if there isn’t some maneuvering room in the price tag…
I know most people can’t tell the difference between a track on a CD and the same track that’s been ripped to an MP3, but I would be screaming with glee if iTunes (or any other online music store for that matter) would begin offering music in a lossless audio format.
Still, this is nice news & I hope it’s a sign of things to come.
Bleep.com have been selling DRM-free 320 kbps MP£s for a while. Not lossless, but nice.
@pauldwaite: Bleep.com looks like a cool site, I’ll have to check it out! Thanks for sharing the link!
BTW, I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of Jamendo.com, but they feature music that’s licensed under Creative Commons and use Bit Torrent to transfer files. I’ve found plenty of artists there that are distributing their music via lossless formats. Here’s another list of artists providing lossless content on the FLAC website: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#music