Just to clear up any confusion, yesterday’s entry was a bit of an April Fools’ meta-joke, made at the expense of those not in the know. The real joke is that what I wrote… wasn’t. In other words, yes, I actually am permanently banned from accessing the internet via the school network. Not very funny when I put it that way, but oh well.
Apple and EMI have teamed up to release EMI Music’s entire catalog on the iTunes Store… without DRM. Not only that, but these tracks will be encoded at a bitrate of 256kbps, double that of the DRM-encumbered tracks currently available, and pretty damn close to CD quality.
Which means that for the first time ever, (some) songs purchased from the iTunes Store will not be limited in how many CDs they can be burned to, or how many iPods or computers they can be played on, or indeed, limited to CDs or iPods or computers at all. You can do with these digital downloads everything you’ve always been able to do with a regular CD purchased from a brick-and-mortar music store, and the sound quality isn’t too far off either.
To be clear, Apple isn’t the first online retailer to offer music sans DRM. Services like eMusic have long sold high-quality, DRM-free music, but the selection was limited to relatively obscure, independent artists. The fact that EMI, one of the Big Four record labels, is jumping on the DRM-free bandwagon—and reports indicate that it was EMI who approached Apple, and not vice versa—marks a giant leap of faith in an otherwise extremely conservative industry that has been stubbornly insisting on an inverse relationship between DRM and piracy for years.
That said, these higher-quality, DRM-free tracks will not be replacing the old DRM-laden ones (yet), but rather offered alongside them for 30 cents more, at $1.29. Full albums, however, will remain at $9.99 a pop. Not a bad deal.
As much as I try to avoid supporting the RIAA because of all the things they do wrong, it would defeat the purpose to not support them when they do something right. So I fully intend to purchase a few albums’ worth of DRM-free music from the iTunes Store when they become available in May, and I encourage anyone planning on buying music under an EMI label to take that route as well, if possible.
Because every DRM-free song purchased sends a message to EMI and the rest of the major labels: You don’t need DRM to make money. DRM has never stopped piracy and it never will, but it does make life harder for your paying customers as well as deter many potential ones. So stop combating piracy, and start competing with it.
Want to sell me some music? Want to sell me anything, for that matter? Make it high-quality, make it affordable, and make it convenient, but by all means, do not saddle it with some ridiculous rights management scheme that dictates what I can or cannot do with my purchases, and assumes I’m a criminal out to destroy your revenue stream. The rest will take care of itself.