It all started with Steve Job's Thoughts on Music, a memo calling for the abolishment of DRM as the best answer to the problem involving music devices interoperability.
No, let me correct that. It all started with an army of consumers, music lovers and users who wanted freedom from the draconian hold of the Recording Industry on the music that people buy and listen to. Steve Job's memo might become one of the most memorable milestones in the abolishment of DRM, but it should not be forgotten than it is the people who really made things move into this direction.
And today, Apple announced that EMI's entire digital music catalog will be sold DRM-free from the iTunes Music Store:
CUPERTINO, California—April 2, 2007—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.
Thought this may no directly affect us since the iTunes Music store is not available in the Philippines, this is still a monumental triumph of of the internet/music community over the RIAA.
Here's EMI's announcement
Head over to techmeme for the party...
DRM is dead. :)
Wow. Welcome to the future.
ReplyDeleteAlthough this does seem like such a slippery slope to be going down...
Maybe that's why the other labels would rather watch on the sidelines for now.
ReplyDeleteI really hope though that this works for EMI and Apple. After all, Steve Jobs was right when he said there's actually little point in selling DRM'ed music when they (digitla music downloads)account only to less than 10% of the whole music sales globally. CDs come DRM-free.