Following speculation earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that EMI will announce tomorrow that it plans to sell much of its music without DRM.
EMI Drops DRM
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Ding dong, the witch is dead! đ
Seriously though, I see this as the real start of the fall of DRM. Hopefully the RIAA along with it. đ I\’m going to go buy some EMI tracks from iTunes when I get home from work just on principle. I\’m sure I can find something I like, they\’ve got the Rolling Stones and Norah Jones.
Yeah, Rolling Stones … and Beatles (when they release in digital). Let’s hope that they are included in the EMI/Apple deal.
I will still buy most of my music from eMusic (you get about 30 songs compared to 8 from iTunes, but smaller selection) although iTunes now becomes very viable for the songs not on eMusic and still worth $1.29.
All around, a good deal. I had better start saving now for the download fest that a high grade Beatles collection download would run me; very unlikely they would ever be on eMusic.
DRM functionality isn’t just the onerous license component we love to hate. It seems to me that media companies will continue to monitor user habits and I find it difficult to believe they will give up fully on aspects of control over their users that DRM gave to them. Within the copy protection ‘mentality’ exhibited by content companies (rights-holders) and the distribution companies like Apple/iTunes there are usually a complex set of profit motivations. So, I wonder about the surveillance aspect of copy protection – some of which is hard-wired into devices. Are our devices still sending messages when we play DRM-less music? Are they still going to collect data on our preferences and play patterns?