The Beginning of The End for DRM? Cheers EMI.
The Cupertino-based company will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads and without any digital right management (DRM technology). Pricing will be $1.29/€1.29/£0.99; however, 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.
— MacNN.
That means you can now quite happily download songs from artists such as Lily Allen (who had her own problems with the iTunes Store) and pirate play them on any music device you want!
When I first heard the news on the radio this afternoon, there was no mention of the latter part of that statement. I thought to myself: I never play music on anything other than my iPod, PowerBook or iMac (yes, Apple have me…) — why should I pay more for these damn songs? Quarter of a song more! Fortunately, the radio cut the article short and I remain a happy geek.
I really don’t see any point, right now, for me to buy any non-DRM singles. Granted, having a higher quality of music is the reason I buy rather than pirate music anyway (I like to know I’m getting the decent quality) but for singles it seems like a waste of money. It’s funny how £0.79 seems like so much less than £0.99. I will probably end up buying a lot more albums though. The iTunes Store is just to damn easy to buy from. I’ll search for one thing and, exactly like my YouTube experiences, I get sucked into related items.
All those people who thought Steve Jobs’ call for no DRM “blog post” was just a load of BS were in fact wrong. Although, it could have all been BS to get people off his back and he just lucked out with one of the major labels jumping on the bandwagon - who knows?
It’s been quite a good week for the iTunes Store; last Thursday a new offer of “Complete My Album” was introduced. This new feature allows you to pay to complete an album from the singles you’ve bought — you can complete these albums up to 180 days from the time you purchased a single.
