EMI Music drops DRM, boosts BPS

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 03 April 2007 04:21

Your IT - Home IT

EMI Music has taken a brave decision to offer higher quality, DRM-free digital downloads, which allow purchased tracks to be played on a wider range of devices other than Apple's iPods, the forthcoming iPhone and computers running iTunes.
We needed one of the major labels to step up to the challenge of DRM-free music, and it's interesting to see that it was UK-based EMI rather than Warner (US), Sony (Japan) or Universal (France).

But Apple's decision to stick with AAC for EMI's DRM-free content means this isn't the immediate breakthrough some reports would have you believe. While the number of devices capable of playing AAC is growing, MP3 support is just about universal.

Apart from Apple, Sony's a relatively big supporter of AAC (eg PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Walkman S and several Sony Ericsson phones). Microsoft's Zune supports AAC, as does the SanDisk Sansa e200R, and various phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and other vendors.

AAC is supported as a standard feature or via plug-ins by many audio players for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you were hoping to start using tracks purchased from the iTunes Store on that $30 generic MP3 player, in the short term you're no better off than you were before the announcement - except for one thing.

I'll explain what that is on the next page.