Apple and EMI Partner To Provide Non-DRM’d Music
By Daniel Miessler on April 2nd, 2007: Tagged as Apple | DRM | Music | Technology
This is big. Here are the highlights:
- EMI‘s entire library available from iTunes without DRM
- Songs are far higher quality, at 256 kbps AAC
- The songs cost a bit more at $1.29 each
I am highly enthused about this, and I’ll definitely be making all future purchases in this format. I do worry about piracy, though. I’ll find it hard to be angry at EMI, for example, if within a month of starting this there are a thousand free, ad-driven sites where you can download entire albums from their library (with album art) — all without DRM.
At that point, what’s the incentive to purchase? Once the word gets out there’ll be tens of thousands of these sites out there. Just another case of a few ruining it for the many. It’s hard to do the right thing in the world we live in; it often results in a swift poke in the eye.
Hell, even the highly moral will be inclined to cheat once in a while. If you just spent $300 dollars on music in the new, expensive format and another couple of albums show up on some newsgroup or bittorrent site, it’s going to be awfully easy to say, “Hmm, I’ll just gank these two…and pay for some more when I get paid again…”
Here are my predictions:
- 10% will buy EVERYTHING and avoid the temptation to steal anything.
- 25% will buy as much as they can afford and steal a good portion of the rest.
- 40% will steal most of what they want and occasionally buy something out of guilt.
- 25% will just steal and not buy anything. Most will feel bad about it but still do it anyway.
Oh well, I hope it ends up being positive for the record companies. I want to see this model succeed. [ Just for the record, I'm the good DRM (Daniel Richard Miessler). Yeah, DRM really are my initials. ]