Finally after years of the music industry treating online paying customers like criminals by crippling music with DRM, the major music group EMI has decided to make its entire catalogue online without DRM. At a higher price of $1.29 / €1.29 / £0.99 per track, EMI's music will be sold with higher sound quality without DRM through iTunes and consumers are free to play them on any platform, software or digital audio player. EMI's Music Videos on iTunes will be made available DRM free at their current price. Apple expects the EMI’s DRM-free Music catalogue to be available through iTunes from May.
It's existing DRM crippled tracks will remain on sale at the original iTunes price. Consumers who already have bought EMI tracks can upgrade their tracks for 30c (EU & US) or 20p (UK) per track to higher quality DRM-free versions.
So far, while both Warner Music Group and Vivendi's Universal music see no logic in removing DRM, both are currently testing DRM free tracks. EMI's move comes just a few months after Steve Job's call on the four major record companies to drop DRM. With 90% of music being sold DRM-free already on CD, Jobs has argued that that offering the remaining 10% crippled with DRM appears to offer no benefit for the record labels, but instead puts the growth of legal music downloads at a disadvantage. Jobs expects over half of iTunes music library to be available free of DRM by the end of the year.
Despite EMI’s higher price, in my opinion, I would sooner pay the extra 30c for a higher quality DRM free version, knowing that there is no way the song can become unplayable as a result of license/DRM authentication problems, hardware incompatibility, etc. Backing up music to CD or DVD would also mean no longer worrying about license authentication issues should the user need to recover their music later. Let’s hope EMI’s move becomes a major success to encourage other major record companies to follow suit.
Thanks to Thanks to RTV71, Waethorn and Deadman for letting us know about this news. More in-depth info on this can be read on Reuters.
I like the idea to cherry pick songs, even though they are a bit more now, at least you do not need to buy the filler.
The other nice thing is they have set the bar higher on the quality of the downloadable product. 256Kbps AAC encoded and now DRM-free. It is just as good as CD now I think at the bitrates they offer. The removal of DRM will be a great experiment to watch. At least now, you can begin to hope for making a purchase based on features..not what DRM it supports. I say Hooray! 
Me likes. The price is ok too but it'd be nice to have a Flac. Do they already have a service where one can order custom covers?
Happy Birthday to you 
