Apple today announced that EMI Music's entire digital catalogue of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just 99 pence per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 20 pence a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalogue, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today —128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM — at the same price of 79 pence per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
"We are going to give iTunes customers a choice – the current versions of our songs for the same 79 pence price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 20 pence 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."
"EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favourite artists," said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group.
With DRM-free music from the EMI catalogue, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favourite EMI artists without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. DRM-free songs purchased from the iTunes Store will be encoded in AAC at 256 kbps, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps, and will play on all iPods, Mac or Windows computers, Apple TVs and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players.
iTunes will also offer customers a simple, one-click option to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free format for 20 pence a song. All EMI music videos will also be available in DRM-free format with no change in price.