iTunes to scrap DRM for all EMI music

[daveyboy]

About time too.

Monday April 2, 2007

EMI and Apple sign landmark deal to scrap DRM

EMI has become the first major record label to ditch digital rights management and start selling music online in CD quality and without copy protection.

In a deal struck with Apple’s iTunes Music Store, announced in London this lunchtime - at a press conference which included a performance from The Good, The Bad & The Queen - EMI said it is making available "superior quality audio" across its entire digital catalogue.

The DRM-free tracks would be available first through iTunes but will subsequently be rolled out across other retail services.

As EMI became the first major label to embrace Jobs’ vision, Jobs today said, "Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry. EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free."

EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli said the deal represented "a major step in our quest to provide consumers with the best possible digital music experience".

He added, "Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music.

"Apple have been a true pioneer in digital music, and we are delighted that they share our vision of an interoperable market that provides consumers with greater choice, quality, convenience and value for money."

The tracks will be available for 99p in the UK, with tracks at the existing quality available for 79p. Consumers will be able to buy entire superior quality albums at the standard AAC price, and upgrade to superior qualitt tracks for 20p per track.

In a controversial statement issued in February, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that DRM software “hasn’t worked, and may never work” to halt music piracy.

“If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store,” said Jobs. “Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.”

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[Earl Purple]

they're going to put the price up to 99p though for what they should have been selling in the first place (no DRM, high bitrate).

99p for a digital track really is a rip-off. And the US price is $1.29 so really it should be the same price here, i.e. about 70p

[Stewie]

^^ I agree, 99p is a p*ss take.... 79p is a good price for a digital price, 99p is not.

[Admin]

I agree with everything that has been said already, they announce it as though they are doing us a good deal, pile of poo imo.

[Earl Purple]

99p is the approximate cost for me if I buy a single track with DRM, burn it onto a CD then rip it back again, which is what I do now.

If I do that for 20 songs at a time then the extra cost for me is about 1p a track.

This is assuming approximately 20p for a CD-R which is about how much they cost nowadays.

It is true that it is more convenient if the tracks don't have DRM in the first place.

[Earl Purple]

ryan2 said:

^^ I agree, 99p is a p*ss take.... 79p is a good price for a digital price, 99p is not.

You think so? I think 79p is a vast overpricing too. About 40p is probably more appropriate. Given that we can say the recording cost is pretty much 0 as they are going to put the song on an album anyway, there is also no manufacturing or distribution cost so the profit is pretty much shared between the recording company, the artist and the hosting site.

40p should also be the price only for new material. Oldies should be sold off very cheaply, maybe 10p-15p a track. After all, one can now go out and find budget collections of oldies with 40 tracks or so at £6 (or less) so the digital versions should be equal value for money.

[Stewie]

I was just saying that for me personally I don't mind paying 79p for a single, seeing as I used to pay say £2.99 or £3.99 for a CD Single BUT if a digital track was 40p I'd jump at the chance and buy every single from I-tunes even if I only liked it a little lol.

As far as I know there is something going on at the moment finding out why we pay the most for singles in the UK anyway so hopefully something will come of that....

[Earl Purple]

I would like to know why they insist on restricting these sites so we can't buy on US sites and they can't buy on ours. This will only encourage more illegal file sharing.

Actually, on 7Digital you can buy from anywhere in the world. Most tracks are 77p, and you don't need to install any special software. That allowed me to purchase the tracks from an internet café in Israel, although I had to renew the DRM on each track when I got home by typing in my e-mail address and password for each one. (I never actually downloaded the tracks in the internet café, although I could have done had I taken my laptop along with me).

We usually paid £1 a track, i.e. £1.99 for a 2-track CD and £2.99 for a 3-track CD, sometimes it was even £1.99 for 3 tracks which meant we were paying 66p per track. We'd expect digital tracks to be cheaper because of the lower overheads and lesser risk, plus the usual drop in quality, much that they claim 128Kbps to be "CD quality" it isn't, and with most people having broadband and larger disk drives, there really is no excuse for selling anything less than 192Kbps.

[daveyboy]

Well albums are going to be the same price as now so with the higher quality that's a better deal than singles... but still £7.90 for a new top 10 album I bought in Sainsburys for £7.97 last month.

iTunes must live in some kind of fantasy world if they expect me ever to buy a download album at £7.90. £6 max. is right for me, if it is uncompressed and includes all the artwork including a printable label for when I burn it to CD. I wouldn't pay more than a fiver without all the artwork and with any kind of lossy compression.

Incidentally Woollies can sell download albums for a couple of pounds cheaper than iTunes so that proves how ripoff are iTunes.

[nickinoo]

I'm just pleased that they're making high-quality, protection-free downloads available. I'm not too bothered about the price as I don't download often enough for it to affect me much. I'm a CD man. I reckon that the price will come down when the HQ downloads become the standard. But at first iTunes will need to sell a better product for more money.

I do think they need to improve on the artwork they provide, and I agree that they could charge less for older albums, and ones that don't sell so well.

[admiral]

I'll admit I'm a moron, but I don't understand DRM. I download songs on itunes all the time but I didn't know there was a restriction. I generally burn them onto a CD and move them to another file where I make future CDs if I want. I use Roxio to burn my CD's. I don't sell them or give them to anyone else, so am I doing something illegal?

[daveyboy]

No because the licence you bought when you downloaded them allows you to burn them to CD and (with restrictions) to copy them to other devices you own.