Apple and EMI’s mysterious announcement is a mystery no longer, as EMI becomes the first major label to take up Jobs’ bold challenge to sell music without DRM, at a small premium.

Today’s news sees EMI becoming the first major record label to partially (yet still COMPLETELY) ditch DRM from their entire digital catalogue for sale through Apple’s iTunes from May onwards, which will likely see all the other major labels follow suit, with Apple's press release giving us the details and EMI's press release giving us some more.

We say ‘partially’ ditch DRM because DRM-free tracks will sell for US $1.29 each, 30c more than DRM laden tracks which will remain on sale at 99c each. It also marks the first time Steve Jobs has allowed a price increase on individual tracks at the iTunes store, although it's more than understandable why Jobs has finally allowed this, as the songs can be transferred to other devices such as competing portable music players, mobile phones and anything else that plays AAC tracks without any restrictions.

On this note, Apple’s press release says that “With DRM-free music from the EMI catalog, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favorite EMI artists without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. DRM-free songs purchased from the iTunes Store will be encoded in AAC at 256 kbps, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps, and will play on all iPods, Mac or Windows computers, Apple TVs and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players”.

Thankfully, Apple and EMI have seen reason on the pricing issue for people who already own songs from EMI’s massive catalog, and will allow users to ‘upgrade’ their songs to the higher quality DRM-free tracks at the cost price of only 30c each, bringing the tracks to a price they would have had to have paid had the DRM-free option been available from day one instead of several years down the track when everyone finally realized how pointless DRM actually is. Apple are also offering a ‘one-click solution’ to upgrade all EMI tracks and likely simultaneously bill your credit card at the same time.

The exact wording in Apple’s press release on this topic is: “iTunes will also offer customers a simple, one-click option to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free format for 30 cents a song. All EMI music videos will also be available in DRM-free format with no change in price”.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO said that: “We are going to give iTunes customers a choice—the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more. We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”

Eric Nicoli, the CEO of the EMI Group said that “EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favorite artists.

So, it would seem that DRM is dead at last – and if it’s not fully dead yet, given that EMI and Apple are still selling tracks with DRM, then DRM is dying a slow and painful death, saved only by the fact that the ‘crippled’ tracks are now on sale at a cheaper price, as DRM clearly degrades the usefulness of music instead of enhancing it.

All we need now is for the other music companies to follow suit, and for the movie companies to see the same kind of logic. Media content providers take note: give consumers a quality product they can use and re-use across all their devices at a fair price, and people will gladly pay the money.

EMI’s previous experiments in selling non-DRM tracks gave them this feedback, Steve Jobs’ manifesto could only have helped push them in the right direction. Hurrah! Steve Jobs, you’ve done it again. Perhaps all we need next is an ‘iClone’ machine from Apple, so we can make sure Steve Jobs stays with us forever!
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