Digital Journal — In a move destined to shake-up the music biz, Apple has announced a deal that puts EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music up for grabs on iTunes, DRM-free. As far as industry changers go, this one will no doubt be big.
Anyone in the tech world saw this coming, as rumours emerged after the Wall Street Journal reported it knew the purpose behind today’s announcement and speculated it would center on the controversial DRM issue.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) refers to technology used to control access of digital media or hardware, such as controlling playback of music files or restricting playback on certain players. Labels are big proponents of the technology as it allows them to control how and where a music file is played, and works to ensure content is bought and paid for. For the customer, however, it’s a pain in the ass — that song you bought from one service doesn’t play in some MP3 players.
But at a joint press conference from London, England, Apple and EMI made the announcement that DRM-free music from the EMI catalog would allow iTunes customers to download tracks without any usage restrictions or limitations on the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. The songs will also be encoded with a higher sound quality, at 256 kbps (twice the current bit rate).
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice — the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”
This news comes after Jobs wrote an open letter to music labels urging the industry to consider DRM and drop the stodgy, old-school approach to selling digital music. Jobs says only 22 out of every 1000 songs on the iPod (3 per cent on average) were purchased from iTunes, while the remaining songs are ripped from either a CD or obtained illegally.
“EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favorite artists,” said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group.
With copyright concerns, protection of revenue stream and more evolution happening in the online music sale front, industry insiders and labels will be watching to see how consumers respond. Early indications suggest it will be a big hit, giving more street cred to Apple and Jobs and putting more pressure on other labels to follow suit.
Apple says iTunes is the world’s largest catalog, containing more than five million songs, 350 television shows and more than 400 movies. It has sold more than two billion songs, 50 million TV shows and more than 1.3 million movies.
The move has been a long time coming and with the power of iTunes, Jobs is one of the few people who could actually get this done. Now it’s a waiting game to see if other labels will spin records in the same direction.
