Apple & EMI: “Pay 30% more for higher-quality and no DRM”

No_drmThe news is out and sadly, you won’t be trotting down Abbey Road listening to the Beatles on your iPod just yet. No, the story is semi-expected due to a Steve Jobs commentary on DRM: Apple and EMI have agreed to sell digital audio without DRM restrictions starting in May (just a month from the expected iPhone launch…hmmmm…). You’ll pay a 30% premium for them to remove the DRM that you didn’t want in the first place, but in return for audio files that you can move across multiple computers and devices, you’ll also get higher quality sound: the $1.29 tracks are encoded in 256 kbps AAC format as opposed to the DRM-tunes at 128 kbps in AAC. That’s a fair trade-off in my opinion, and you can pay the additional $.30 a track to "upgrade" tunes you already own.

Which labels are next to follow? More importantly, which on-line music stores will over the same or do they need to? Will folks just buy the DRM tracks from iTunes and move to their Zune, Sansa or Dell DJ? OK, perhaps not the Dell DJ, although that was my first DAP. ;)

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