Apple And EMI Drop DRM For iTunes And iPod

April 3rd, 2007

This is pretty cool news, that the more I read about, seems to be win-win for everyone: EMI, Apple, and the consumer. To quote Steve Jobs (from SFGate):

“I think customers are going to love this,” Jobs said. “This is an opportunity for everybody to win. Customers win because they get what they want. The music companies make little bit more money by offering a little bit more value. Everybody wins here.”

How EMI wins

• A positive image boost for EMI as the first music publishing company to go with no DRM. Some users will undoubtedly buy EMI’s music via iTunes on principle alone.
• Because the album pricing of non-DRMed music is the same as DRMed music the folks who really want to “save” money might go for full album downloads over single songs, which means more money for EMI.
• The slightly higher price for single tracks = extra cash per song.

How Apple wins

• Apple surely gets a bit of that extra cash per song.
• It’s a boost to Apple’s AAC format. In a sneaky way, Apple may be angling to replace MP3 as the compressed music format of choice.
• Steve Jobs also comes out smelling like a rose, since he wrote that initial anti-DRM letter. Maybe he knew EMI was thinking and rode on their coattails, but to many it looks like he and convinced the music company to go along with his idea of no-music-DRM.
• Apple sells more iPods, since buying them and using iTunes no longer means locking yourself into its DRM.
• It’s possible some insanely anti-DRM folks will take the step of “upgrading” their music from purchased AAC to DRM-less AAC. There’s additional incentive for people to do this, as the bit rate is higher. I foresee lots of 25 charges adding up to a huge amount due to these upgrades.

How The Consumer Wins

• Many people resisted iTunes music because of the “intrusive” DRM (which I feel wasn’t, really). Now there really isn’t any excuse, except cheapness.
• Buying Apple music doesn’t mean you’re locked into using Apple.
• There are now more options to share your music. No DRM means unlimited burning to CDs, unlimited computers you can play said music on, and… er… “sharing” tracks with your friends. But let’s not start doing the last one right off the bat, please?

Additional Reading: SFGate, Mathew Ingram, ParisLemon, The Blog Herald, IPcentral Weblog, ZDnet, New York Times