Apple and EMI To Sell Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on iTunes Store

Here's some news everyone can use. EMI Music has announced new premium downloads of its huge digital music catalog which will be DRM-free, and will be available at a higher sound quality 256 kbps AAC encoding instead of the normal 128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM. EMI will be offering the new tracks through all of their online music partners, but Apple's iTunes Store will be first to sell the higher quality tracks, free of digital rights management at $1.29 per song, a bit more than the 99 cents you're used to paying. Now, if you've already purchased EMI songs with DRM from the iTunes Store, you'lll be able to upgrade all previously purchased EMI tracks to the higher quality DRM-free versions for 30 cents a song. DRM-free EMI music will be available in on the iTunes Store in May.

"With DRM-free music from the EMI catalog, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favorite 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."

This is just the beginning folks. Expect the other major record labels to go the same route... if EMI's DRM-free content is a hit with online music customers.

Here's what Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO had to say about it:

“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.”