Today, EMI and Apple announced the availability of the entire 5 Million song EMI catalog on iTunes DRM Free. This is the first major step towards a DRM free music Universe.
This undoubtedly was affected by Steve Jobs’ open letter to the 4 Major RIAA partners, and is an extremely important development in the world of music sharing and the ability to discover new music through the network of your friends.
This step will hail a new wave of iTunes consumers because people like me want to have copies of music they can freely move around without the worry of DRM getting in the way. This has been the main reason that I have not purchased anything (except for Mine Again for BRTC) from the iTunes Music Store.
The message is simple: Trust your consumers, and they’ll be more likely to buy your product.
Edit (2007-04-02 22:10 pdt): The one thing I did forget to mention is that this will be treated as a premium service, with iTunes offering higher bitrate tracks (256kbps it would seem) without DRM for $.30 (US) more per track. Money well spent if you ask me.
I am not positive that allowing consumers the ability to distribute digital products is all that good an idea. I believe that given the chance, most music customers would download the music for free rather than pay for it. The content owners must find a way to allow their customers use of their purchase while keeping them from distributing it to others.
If content owners are not rewarded for their creation, sooner or later they will stop creating it.
That is a valid concern and it remains to be seen whether this is truly a good idea. I for one thing that this will without a doubt help the sales of music, particularly digital music by removing one of the last remaining barriers.
DRM posed other problems than just being a “copy-protection” mechanism. Songs on the iTunes music store were protected using Apple’s AAC format. This is all well and good if you want to play your music on an iPod, but if you have a Microsoft Zune, or any number of low-end, low-budget music players, they wouldn’t support the AAC format, and iTunes couldn’t/wouldn’t authorize the device.
I haven’t been a customer of the iTunes store for one main reason: I couldn’t download songs in MP3 format and move them around between my own personal devices at will. Instead, I bought CD’s.
Will this move by Apple and EMI hurt the sales of CD’s? It just might. Because I for one will now be buying my music from online sources like iTunes and PureTracks who are supporting DRM Free music.