After much speculation yesterday, EMI has confirmed that it will make all of its music catalog available for download on iTunes without any copyright protection.

This is the first time that one of the big four music publishers – EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony BMG – has decided to get rid of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and throws up the challenge to the others to do something similar. EMI acts include Radiohead, Coldplay, A Perfect Circle, Norah Jones and Joss Stone, among others. Steve Jobs came to London to make the joint announcement with EMI yesterday afternoon. 

DRM technology was designed to prevent music piracy but has, largely, failed and most people see it as an unfair measure that restricts what they can do with the music they have paid for.

The EMI/Apple move is good news but iTunes users will have to stump up a little bit more cash for the privilege. DRM-free tracks will cost 20p more at 99p each but, Apple has said that the tracks have a higher audio quality than regular iTunes downloads. They will boast 256kbps AAC encoding which Apple claimed makes the “audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording”. It is also twice that of current iTunes downloads.

“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice—the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”

At 20p extra per track, I think most people  - those who don't tend to download music illegally, that is - will not find it too much of a financial burden. 

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