CUPERTINO, California—April 2, 2007—Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
This is big news from Apple and EMI. Not mentioned in the initial press release, but later confirmed by EMI, is that the full album price will remain the same as before and that only the single-track price will be going up.
To me it seems like the price hike for DRM-free high quality tracks will act as a carrot to entice the other labels to follow suit. As soon as they see they can make more money selling DRM-free music, they’ll jump on board.
