Apple EMI Deal
Monday, April 2nd, 2007
By now, almost everyone has heard the news that Apple and EMI have reached a deal to put EMI’s entire catalog on the iTunes Music Store DRM-free (DRM-free! I repeat, DRM-free!), so I will just say a few things about it.
The DRM-free downloads are priced higher at $1.29 instead of $.99, but are also of higher quality 256 kbps, instead of 128 kbps.
Maybe most importantly, buying a full album will cost the same as before, which should actually encourage entire album sales, unlike the ‘Complete My Album’ feature, which likely will not have much of an impact at all.
Also encouraging, is that this deal will put pressure on more record labels to follow EMI and make their catalogs available DRM-free.
There is still the question of interoperability between mp3 playing devices, but overall, this is another welcome step.
Here are some links on the news…