Apple today announced that EMI Music's entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store worldwide in May.
iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today — 128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM — at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
"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."
With DRM-free music from the EMI catalog, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favorite EMI artists without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. DRM-free songs purchased from the iTunes Store will be encoded in AAC at 256 kbps, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps, and will play on all iPods, Mac or Windows computers, Apple TVs and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players.
"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.
iTunes will also offer customers a simple, one-click option to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free format for 30 cents a song. All EMI music videos will also be available in DRM-free format with no change in price.
Apple's iTunes Store features the world's largest catalog with over five million songs, 350 television shows and over 400 movies. It has sold over two billion songs, 50 million TV shows and over 1.3 million movies, making it the world's most popular online music, TV and movie store.
For a list of popular EMI bands, see this Wikipedia page.
160 Comments
Great news
Congrats Apple and EMI!
It sucks though they now offer it for 1.29. Seems Steve Jobs couldn't keep it at 0.99 because that is what he wanted all along! It would be really great if the DRM free songs didn't complement the "normal" tunes, but *replaced* them.
Win-Win all round. Fantastic.
After a suitable period of denial expect the other majors to fall in line. This is a realistic workable model.
It sucks though they now offer it for 1.29. Seems Steve Jobs couldn't keep it at 0.99 because that is what he wanted all along! It would be really great if the DRM free songs didn't complement the "normal" tunes, but *replaced* them.
Albums cost the same and the encoding rate is doubled. Life in the real world is a negotiation.