There was a time when the main headlines about online music distribution were mainly about new DRM technologies, improvements against hacking, interoperability issues and so on.  Luckily the peak of all this has already past with EMI and more recently Universal both allowing their music to be sold DRM free through some services.  Warner Music, a major label that has been very reluctant to try dropping DRM, has now decided to start selling singles and albums through Amazon's online music download store without DRM.  This means that Amazon will be selling music from three of the four major labels that can be played on any MP3 player, including the iPod and Zune series.

Back in February when Apple's chief executive tried calling on record companies to drop DRM, Warner's chairman considered abandoning DRM as "Completely without logic or merit" due to games and movies both already carrying copy protection measures, so it seems like they have realised that selling music with DRM is actually not a bad idea after all.  It is unclear at this time if Warner will offer its music through other services such as iTunes without DRM, although there is a rumour that the company was seeking to negotiate such a deal with iTunes.

Now this just leaves Sony BMG, one of the last four major labels to stick with DRM.  At the moment, the only sign of Sony BMG to test out DRM-free music is through an expected promotion early next year where it plans to experiment with selling MP3s.  It was not that long ago that Sony BMG got a lot of bad publicity for its use of dangerous rootkits technology on audio CDs.  Sony is even behind the Blu-ray high definition disc format, which features additional layers of copy protection that HD DVD lacks, which shows just how serious the company is when it comes to copy protecting content.

Further information can be read on this New York Times source.