The day the DRM died

I’m going to start this post by making a confession - I’ve never been that bothered by DRM - I don’t like it, I’d rather have all my content in my control but I’m also a realist and understant that certain things aren’t ’sold’ just licenced or rented.

Licencing is a model that’s existed in the broadcasting and media world for a long time but mainly between different producers and broadcasting bodies - with the advent of digital media DRM allowed for the licencing model to come to the consumer.

It hasn’t ‘really’ worked as consumers don’t see things that way. If I pay for something then I should be able to do what I want with it - at least that seems to be the attitude a number of people on forums, blogs, comment boards seem to have.

And record labels seem to be waking up to that. At least EMI do. Today, EMI, one of the big four record labels announced that they would be selling DRM free songs through the iTunes Store.

But it isn’t quite that simple - the songs will be sold at a higher bitrate than everything else and will be more expensive.

At the moment I can pay 79p for a 128kbps AAC track on iTunes. When this comes in I will be able to pay 99p (still a fair price) for a 256kbps AAC track by an EMI artist. You can even upgrade your old 128kbps tracks for 20p each.

Albums stay the same price but will be available DRM free and at the higher bitrate.

This is the BIG selling point for me. I can live with the DRM as I have an iPod and have no intention of getting anything else but having songs available at a higher bitrate makes a big difference.

For most modern music you wouldn’t notice much difference between 128 and 256 but if you like classical music or tracks involving large orchestras or more ‘epic’ music then you really will hear the difference.

Finish with a quote from Steve Jobs.

“Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry. EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free.”

Complete my album

Another Apple iTunes related post I’ve had sitting in my draft folder for a couple of days was the ‘Complete my Album‘ initiative Apple launched last week.

Basically if you’ve brought a single from iTunes you can buy the whole album and have the cost of the single deducted from the final cost of the album - so if you brought 3 singles at 79p each and the album costs £7.99 you would only pay £5.62 to complete the album.

The only problem I’ve got with this is - if I’ve only brought three tracks from an album it’s because there were only three tracks worth owning on the album.

One of the biggest advantages iTunes has over buying a CD is that I only have to pay for the three or four good tracks on the album and can leave the other six or seven behind.

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