Buy Music from iTunes, Play it on Your Zune!

EMI becomes the first major music company to partially drop DRMs on music downloading. The company announced that “premium” versions of EMI tracks will lack the digital locks common to songs available via iTunes and the Zune Marketplace.

The company said every song in its catalogue will be available in the "premium" format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now. The cost for iTunes Store will be $1.29 per track. Regular tracks at 99 cents will still be available but the DRM will still lock the songs to the iPod.

The other good news is the sound quality. The “premium” tracks are twice the sound quality of currently available EMI tracks.

Albums will also be free of DRM and at the higher quality but the price will remain the same.

If you buy EMI’s premium tracks on iTunes, you will be able to transfer them to your Zune without any conversion.

This is going to be a test for the Zune Marketplace with the Zune to Zune sharing. We will see if EMI agrees to integrate their premium versions of the songs in the Zune marketplace and let users share the content. I don’t see why they would object to that but we never know!

Popular EMI artists include Lily Allen, Joss Stone, Robbie Williams, Coldplay and Corinne Bailey Rae. "Consumers tell us they would be prepared to pay a higher price for a piece of music they can play on any player," said EMI boss Eric Nicoli.

"We have to trust our consumers," he said. "We have always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and convenient."

BBC [via]

Comments

[Bluedude]

Definitely a step in the right direction. I remember reading something later that disappointed me though. The 1$29 'high-quality' songs sold by the iTunes Shop will be in AAC format instead of MP3. Besides, I'm not going to buy a CD for like, $10 on iTunes when the retail version will only cost $15, including a booklet, artwork etc, and the possibility to make a perfect 320 kb/s rip yourself.