Online Shoppers Blog - Become's Pocket Change

Congratulations. The people have spoken and at least one member of the heavily maligned RIAA listened. EMI will begin selling music without copy protection during the month of May, with Apple hoping to have half of the store's catalog available in an unprotected format by the end of the year. Unfortunately iTunes customers will be paying a little extra for EMI's DRM-free tracks, as the cost per unrestricted song will be $1.29.

Some may argue that an additional thirty cents is just too costly when the primary benefit is the loss of technically induced restrictions. Those people will be happy to hear that the previously established rate of $.99 will continue to be available, as users will be given a choice between music with or without copy protection, depending on their needs. In addition, EMI album downloads will retain the $9.99 price point while still giving users the benefits of DRM-free music.

As an added incentive to acquire unprotected tracks, each song will be encoded at a much higher rate, resulting in better sound that may or may not be noticeable, depending on your audio equipment and general aural awareness. Sounds like a good deal to me. Apple will still be using the AAC format, so if your mp3 player doesn't natively support AAC, you'll still have to manually convert each song to remain compatible, although I'd imagine that the end result won't be quite as painful, since the boosted bitrate should give you a little more room to hack and slash, so to speak.

Further reading on the EMI/Apple deal: BusinessWeek has a great article on the news and its implications, while Engadget brings us back to earth with their views on the announcement.

Sean

Edit: Moved things around a bit