EMI Drops DRM

[bryant]

EMI’s going to sell all their music online without DRM. It’ll be available through iTunes first; it’ll also cost 30 cents more for a track without DRM, but the quality will be twice as high. If you want to keep the old price, you’ll still be able to get DRM’d tracks for a buck.

Albums will be DRM-free at the same old price. You’ll be able to convert your DRM’d tracks to non-DRM tracks for 30 cents per track.

This is pretty good. Philosophically, I don’t want to pay more for music without the DRM, but since the quality is better I won’t mentally grumble too much. And since I buy most of my music by the album anyway? No big deal.

I should be able to convert full albums to DRM-less at no charge, though.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Very cool. Hopefully the beginning of the end for DRM on iTunes.

[head58.livejournal.com]

But all the tracks there will stil be in that silly m4p format anyway, right? Since I'm one of three people in the world who doesn't use an ipod, when I buy stuff from iTunes I almost always burn it to a cd from iTunes and then rip that cd to mp3 using Windows Media Player or the software that came with my non-ipod player or something and presto! No DRM!

(because if I try to use iTunes to convert the file directly to mp3, it tells me it won't because of the drm, which gets me all hulk-type-mad and wanting to SMASH)

[bryant]

Prolly m4a format now, which is the same thing sans DRM.

What's your MP3 player again? It might actually support m4a; it's a completely open format.

[head58.livejournal.com]

If it means I can buy stuff without having to go through that whole conversion process, I'll spend the darn extra money per song, yes.

But I'm using an older Creative Nomad Zen Xtra, and I believe it only supports mp3, wma and wav. The player I had before, the Rio Karma, would support pretty much anything but that one died a horrible messy death.

[bryant]

Yeah, you're SOL.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

The upgraded quality is a nice touch: it makes you feel like you're getting something (I am, I generally use 192 as a compromise, so this will be better than what I'd've ripped myself).

That said, the vast majority of our music is from our own CD collection (920+ and counting!), and I don't know what fraction is DRM-encumbered EMI music. Hmm. I wonder if that's in the library xml and can be discovered via an XSLT transform...

[bryant]

I checked the iTunes Music Store this morning; while the EMI non-DRM tracks aren't there yet, Apple has implemented a feature allowing you to buy the remainder of an album. It did in fact figure out which albums I'd only bought one single from, and offered me the chance to automatically buy the rest of that album at a reduced cost.

So they've got the technology. I haven't looked at the library XML; it might be derivable from there.

(Side note: you say XSLT transform, I say XML::Simple, let's call the whole thing off!)