Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr is still living in a pre 2nd of April, 2007-era with claims from one of his executives that “the weakest, most desperate music company” did a deal with Jobs on DRM.

According to the Business Week article, Bronfman has long wanted Apple's pricing policies to change - meaning prices to go UP. It must be annoying to him that Apple has indeed raised their prices, but for an unexpected reason - to deliver DRM-free music. BusinessWeek quoted a Warner Music executive “who asked not to be named told BusinessWeek.com that he believes Apple's motivation has little to do with compatibility and is more about selling iPods and fighting off the complaints by European regulators”.

The executive told Business Week that “If Jobs really believed in interoperability, he would have licensed FairPlay from the start. So what does he do to shake off regulators in Europe? He goes after the weakest, most desperate music company to help him promote DRM-free.”

Talk about a weak argument from Warner Music. Apple and iTunes have always been fully interoperable with DRM-free CDs which could be easily converted into MP3s or AAC tracks, with no restrictions on those songs being easily imported into iTunes at will and shared between devices in the home or car without any issues whatsoever.

The real issue here is the ridiculous investigation from the European Union into a company legally selling music through iTunes that can only work on iPods. If the EU is so worried, they should also force Gillette razors to work with Shick blades, but that’s a fight we’ll never see the EU take up because it’s patently ridiculous to force Gillette to do so. For more on my views on the craziness of the EU’s stance on iTunes and Apple, have a read through my previous article entitled “Norway declares iTunes illegal! What the…?”.

It’s easy to claim that Apple is just trying to head off the regulators, with the advent of DRM free music just a happy accidental outcome. But if typically heavy handed government intervention and regulation actually ends up being the trigger that makes music (and ultimately movies) DRM free, then blow me down – for once a government accidentally got something right.

One of the other big issues surrounding the advent of DRM-free music is what this means for the mobile cell phone world. Currently, mobile broadband data pricing is ridiculously expensive, and is only also now seeing a revolution thanks to companies like Hutchison and the ‘3 Mobile’ X-Series service which, in Australia, lets you buy 2Gb of mobile downloads through your phone and 4000 minutes of Skype calls for AUD $40 per month. That’s the cheapest rate for true mobile broadband ever offered in Australia (in most Australian capital cities only at this stage as that is where ‘3 Mobile’s 3.5G HSDPA network covers).

In Australia, Vodafone was forced by the announcement to drop their prices accordingly, and while their prices are still double that of 3 Mobile’s at AUD $79.95 per month for 2Gb, it still represents a hefty drop from a price of around AUD $100 per month for an approximate 1Gb download limit.

3 Mobile’s X-Series pricing is meant to bring mobile broadband pricing into line with fixed broadband pricing. Naturally, it has some way to go before we start seeing download caps of 10Gb or greater, but at AUD $40 per month, they are certainly beating some fixed providers who only offer 400Mb of download through ADSL for a similar price.

SoundBuzz, a company that sells music with the Windows Media DRM to PCs and phones (with the phone downloads using whatever DRM system different brands of mobile phones use) are rightly concerned over how the advent of DRM-free music will affect cell phone downloads of music, given that high bitrate music downloads are large files, and that not every country has access to inexpensive mobile broadband data. One example they raise is India, which hasn’t even yet issued 3G licenses, let alone started installing a 3.5G HSDPA network as is happening in many countries around the world.

So, what does else Soundbuzz think about DRM-free music in a cell phone world? Please read onto page 2 for a direct quote of their concerns, and for the conclusion on how I think DRM-free music should be sold so that buying the music, instead of pirating it, is the natural choice in a world of DRM-free.