Wednesday, May 30, 2007

iTunes, EMI and non-DRM Music

The iTunes Store began selling DRM-free music from EMI's catalog today. When Steve Jobs made the announcement a couple of months ago that Apple and EMI had reached an agreement to do this, he predicted more than half the songs on iTunes would be available without DRM by the end of the year. The heads of the other three major music labels disputed Jobs' optimism on that, standing by their policy that DRM is necessary to keep digital music from being pirated.

According to some posters at the Macintouch web site, there appears to be a huge initial response to the DRM-free music being offered at the iTunes Store. The site has been slow and downloads have timed out, presumably due to heavy traffic on the site.

Provided the apparent, huge interest isn't a brief one-time event, it would seem the other major labels may begin to rethink their position with regard to the DRM issue and Jobs' prediction may very well come to pass.

Personally, I never previously considered purchasing any songs from the iTunes Store because of the DRM and the limitation of all songs being encoded at 128 Kbps. With the availability of DRM-free songs and the much higher 256 Kbps encoding, I expect I will buy the occasional song there in the future.

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