Jobs: good as his word.
 

You might all remember the piece "thought on music" well, look who actually followed through on his pontificating:

High Quality and DRM free.

Sure, it's no everything in the iTunes catalogue, but it's a good start. All I want to do is find all the idiot pundits I've seen over the last few weeks... (for some reason, the pundits on this particular topic really bugged me.)

The way forward
 

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Definitely a step in the right direction! I’ve been watching this unfold – this is going to change things. Cudos to EMI for throwing the weight of its entire catalogue behind this strategic move.

Sure, we can gripe about details (upping the price; still not lossless…) But the industry has good reason to be watching, and the pressure will soon be on the other players.

In the meantime, lets hear it for 100 indy labels following through and joining the iTunes Store with similar announcements! Let Apple broaden its offerings significantly – while waiting for the other three huge players to follow suit.

awwww...

I really liked DRM... please bring it back. :D


whilst we are on the subject... I hope the Movie industry are taking note...

EMI's music videos will also be DRM-free. Maybe that will send a message to the movie industry.

I'm just excited to get some of my videos back in a DRM free format (I've got a couple from them), don't quite know how I'd take advantage of it, but it will make me feel good knowing that I can use them as I please.

Quick question about how this works out. Sure there's no DRM on the software, but there's still a EULA, right? I still can only use it for myself, ie, it's not legal to just throw these on P2P?

Sakes Alive! I hope that this is not read by the RIAA or the other labels, or it'll scare away others from removing DRM as well.

The music or videos are still someone else's creative property, just as with the CD or DVD which you'd buy a physical copy of. Distributing copies to others would still be improper.

I hope that things go well for EMI so that others take heart and follow suit. A coincidental drop in sales could be bad news for this experiment, while a substantial increase in sales would likely be seen as a large vote for one or both of increased quality and drop of DRM. If this goes well, then (together with the 'Complete your Album' addition) digital music use will probably really take off.

Piracy probably wasn't your intent, you were just asking about EULAs I assume, but we have to be careful you know, really, this is the sort of quote that proves that the software and music companies were RIGHT.

When talk of piracy comes up all the user base goes "Shame on you corporate suits, Your DRM presumes us guilty until proven innocent, calling me a pirate, I'm not a pirate! I would buy your product if it wasn't copy-protected. I would buy more. I'm honest! Stop calling me a criminal."

And then Apple gives us our first big chance to prove WE are right, and already some users are going to take that rope and let us hang ourselves by talking about P2P already. If people buy DRM-free music and start pirating the hell out of it and sales don't stay up, we may never get another chance. Let's not spoil it.

Transcript of chat with Steve Jobs (Apple) and Eric Nicoli (EMI).

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2624

Also from AppleInsider

Definitely. But I honestly don’t think that removing DRM on music sold online will boost illegal P2P – quite the contrary. As far as I know, online sales account for only 10% of totals. Consider the following quote by Steve Jobs from today’s Question-and-Answer session:

...uh yeah, and stuff. So, my excuse for today is that I wrote most of that rather early in the morning (for me), so...

Yes, I know Intellectual Property Rights still apply, and I would assume that the owners of said rights want a one purchase one user policy. I have no problems with this. Anyone who is familiar with my soap-boxing on software piracy will hopefully bear me out on this. I did not intend to make it sound like P2P was okay, I was just...wording things stupidly I guess, sorry :).

I'd be shocked if Universal followed through on this. Especially since they have some arrogant bigot as CEO.

Well for my part, I'm going to apologize too. I think I was overreacting now. Later in the day I realized that big companies like Apple and EMI do not do something unless it's been looked over by an army of accountants and lawyers. They've probably built in a factor for a certain amount of piracy and have a risk analysis that says they'll make more money without DRM than with. I read another article today that said that with the non-DRM being slightly more expensive and much better quality, the psychological effect might be that buyers might feel more ownership and less inclination to give it away.

I guess we will all see soon enough.

That sounds possible. The other side of that is that because a lot of stuff on P2P is ******* quality, people have no qualms downloading it, because it's like a rough photocopy instead of a professional pirating operation.

Personally, I've never really had a problem with the Fairplay DRM. I've never felt restricted by it, but I understand other people's opinions on it. However I've been reluctant to pay for 128kbps!! I think I might be more inclined to pay for the higher quality. (I do still like the physical object however, call me old fashioned)

I fail to understand why Apple doesn’t just make the jump to lossless downloads, at least as an option. It seems fair when the customer is being asked to pay that much per music cut. That would convince me –

128kpbs AAC is supposed to sound like 192kbps MP3 or something, due to compression.

Perhaps some high-quality VBR AAC's could save Apple bandwidth while giving people high-quality sound.

I must admit that whatever they use to rip tracks is very very good. It's better at 128 than you would think it should be. AAC or not.

The new DRM free songs are encoded at 256kbps AAC. They do cost another 30 cents though, at 1.29 per song. I think it's still worth it.

I am completely convinced that they are not going to lossless until the market or competition forces them to. They are going to do what they do with the iPod: Dribble the cool, currently achievable features one by one over the course of a decade so that we have to buy another iPod at least every 2-3 years. I bought one iPod, a shuffle, and will try to hang on until they put crossfade into the full-size iPod itself like they have in iTunes. After a few years they have reached gapless playback, so I figure another couple years before they get around to crossfade.

It's like the record companies who loved the fact that they were able to sell many of the public the CD versions of the vinyl or cassettes they already owned. They sold us 128K AAC, now they're going to sell 256K AAC of the same songs, and they'll try to string us out as an upgrade revenue stream of incremental improvements as long as possible before we get lossless. That is more profitable for them and for Apple than giving us lossless today. I hope I'm wrong.

Unfortunately, I think you’re right.

The day they offer lossless, will be the day I purchase my first cut from the iTunes Music Store. Until that day, I’ll buy my music in the shop.

My the decision to buy from the iTunes music store is simple. I don't want to buy the whole album most of the time. Sadly, I have a small infatuation with pop music, and it's so hit and miss that I usually will only want one track from a CD (oddly, pop musicians tend to rely on luck more than skill). So, one track for 99 cents is very reasonable for me, and I've bought close to 360 tracks from iTMS (I'm not you're typical user). And while it's true that the music is not lossless, it does sound very very good. And honestly, I don't know that I even have the equipment to make use of a lossless format anyway, my headphones are only so good!

And you don't have to pay a full $1.29 for the higher quality. You can 'upgrade' your DRM-protected songs to higher-quality non-DRM songs for 30 cents. Official Apple press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html

I wonder if EMI videos are going to get the same treatment. Probably not.

Actually yeah, they are. But you don't have to pay an upgrade fee, you just get them replaced by Apple with DRM free versions.

That's cool. I didn't think the videos would get the treatment since music was explicitly mentioned, and the term was stressed in the press release.

Great argument! The freedom to pick-and-choose is clearly one of the great advantages of iTMS.

I also think the option of being able to upgrade your music library to higher quality, DRM-free tunes is a winner! That’s certainly a wise, loyalty-building measure from Apple and EMI. I hope iTMS provides a similar offer at every future turn of the road.