Great news from the UK this morning, with EMI Records and Apple announcing that the entire EMI catalog will be available without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. The key bit:
“EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI’s existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI’s retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI’s new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.
Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said, “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music.”
It’s about time.
Other key bits:
- DRM-free tracks will be priced at $1.29 (a 30% price premium over DRM-restricted tracks)
- The new tracks will be encoded in higher-quality
- Customers who already have old (DRM’d) tracks can “upgrade” them for $0.30 each
More choice is good. More interoperability is good. And the customer can decide whether the additional capabilities are worth an extra $0.30 or not. I like it.
Chris,
What effect, if any, does this have on SONY/BMG and UMG?
Thanks,
George
Hi, George. I think this tack implies a number of things:
Thought 1: In particular, Sony needs to reallllly rethink their strategy. This is a great differentiator for EMI, especially in light of the Sony rootkit fiasco last year, which is exactly 180deg. away from what EMI just did.
Thought 2: The purveyors of movies/music universally need to think about adopting this strategy of openness for another very important reason — the device that one will use for playback is transient. It’s just a channel. I may want to listen to my songs on my computer, then pipe them to my AppleTV, take them with me on my iPod, and also pull them to my iPhone. Removing the DRM shackles makes that ubiquity possible. Otherwise, every type of device needs to support a multitude of DRM formats, which rapidly becomes impractical.