DRM-free music will be coming your way soon! Apple and EMI (an independent music company based in London) have just announced their plans to sell songs that are DRM free to iTunes customers starting in May. EMI is taking their entire catalog of digital music and removing the DRM restrictions, giving iTunes the first opportunity to sell the music.
Not only will the music be free of the digital rights management, it will also be a better sound quality which will gives users an overall better experience.Could this be the start of the end for DRM restrictions? This issue has frustrated people for a long time because DRM places so many restrictions on what users are able to do with the songs that they’ve purchased.
Come May, iTunes will be selling each of the songs from the EMI catalog minus the DRM for $1.29 which is just 30 cents more than music with the DRM hold on them. You’ll find songs from big names like The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Keith Urban, and many others.
Another incentive that Apple will be offering is that if you’ve purchased EMI content on iTunes before, you will be able to upgrade all of your songs for 30 cents each. This also will include music videos.
—New Poll!—
This leads us to our next poll — Is DRM-free music worth the extra cost? People have wanted this option but are they willing to pay for it?
I think it’s great that this will be an option, not only because it gives people freedom to listen to songs on multiple devices that they own, but also because the music will be at a higher quality that was previously not available. And hopefully it will open the door to other groups willing to offer their music sans DRM as well.
Give us your vote in the left side-bar. Are you willing to pay an extra 30 cents more per song?
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Tags: General, Web Sites, Apple, Downloads, iTunes, Microsoft, Music, Screenshots
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hey what’s wrong with the torrent, i think they are DRM fress too
April Fools?
Nope, no April fools!
They’d have to do this to convince me to buy music again:
*DRM-free
*70 cents price (30 cents cheaper, not 30 cents more expensive)
*.WAV quality music…nothing less (why should I buy music online in a significantly lower quality, when I can get it cheaper and higher quality on CD)
*Majority of profits going to the artists (the major labels often don’t return even a cent of every CD’s sales to the artists, and in many cases artists owe money to the labels for signing with them..and lose money on each CD sale…and only have the option to make money off of tours/concerts)
This was a manipulative way to force consumers to pay more for DRM-free music, which is something music started out as (DRM-free)
The last question in this audio of the announcement:
http://cache.cantos.com/mp3/pj.....v2_MP3.mp3
a good reporter calls them out on the fact that a 20% price increase is unjustified..b/c it isn’t really adding anything…we couldn’t have had and more..before the birth of DRM, and costs no more to produce.
It’s 20% pure profits going in there hands…and people are so blind sighted by this for some reason. This fundamentally changes nothing in the music industry…it only restores what we once had (DRM-free music) at a hiked cost to the consumer. This is the music industry at it’s worst, not at it’s best….it isn’t evolving in any way with the industry and consumer demands.
I still prefer to buy the CD’s… but the higher quality should’ve been around anyway. 128 kbps is just retarded to begin with.
I also prefer to have a physical copy, so no matter what happens to my computer, I’ll still have the music.
…in conclusion, I like CD’s.
Agreed Kevin….I never even realized that all digital music sales are no better quality than around 128-256 kbps….that is horrible…they are merely playing the market of the average consumer who listens to music on crappy headphones…and low volumes…so they can’t detect the lack of quality in the audio files themselves…and it allows them to save a ton on bandwidth costs.
I’ve always hated less than CD quality sound..simply b/c all lower quality sound and codecs are designed to get rid of the sound frequencies you hear primarily at higher decibels (volume).
If anyone knows a good place to find pirated CD quality music..w/o DRM online…pleeeease let me know. Thanks!
First, isn’t $1.20 21 cents more than 99 cents, not thirty?
Next, yes, I’d be willing to pay 20 cents more for DRM-free music. In fact, I’d be willing to pay another 20 cents for lossless encoded music. While these should have been part of online music from the start, and therefore consumers should not have to pay more for them, the fact is that they weren’t, and at least this is progress in the right direction. Eventually some online store will start under-cutting, and the price will go back down.
As a side note, I like CDs too, but often I only like one or two songs on the album, in which case it is saving me money to buy online. When buying the whole album is worth the money, I do.
@Curtiss: I definitely see where you are coming from, but I am glad to see at least a small amount of relief on the DRM front. Small steps will hopefully lead to big changes…and DRM is my worst nightmare right now. I hate everything about it and try to purchase as little music online as I have to…CD’s are definitely the way to go still in my opinion.
@MetaMan: It was supposed to be $1.30 which means that it is about a $0.30 increase. It’s a little high in my opinion but I would reather pay a little bit extra to get music without the DRM.
My position stands. I would pay 30 cents more for DRM-free music, and I would also pay 30 cents more for lossless music.
Although I salute EMI for dropping that crappy DRM, I’m not willing to pay more for DRM-free music. Their music should have been DRM-free in the first place!
A while ago, I bought some songs from indepedent artists and I asked the artists if they would mind if I removed the FairPlay DRM from their music. They didn’t mind, nor did they ask me to pay an additional 30 cents…