Surprisingly nice news from Apple. EMI is going to start offering its music DRM-free and Apple iTunes is going to be the first store. Songs are also going to be higher quality than before. The quality is 256 kbps AAC files. (The quality should be high enough that the human hearing system shouldn’t notice any difference if you boost up the quality even more. But I think the professionals will disagree with this as always. I’m not a professional and I don’t notice the difference with a CD-audio and a 128 kbps MP3.)

Back to the point. At first, the DRM-free song is going to be more expensive, 1.29€, as the old DRM song is 0.99€. If you’ve bought songs lately, you can soon upgrade these to higher quality and DRM-free for 0.30€ per song. Also if you buy the whole album, you’ll get the DRM-free and higher quality tracks automatically and for the same price. I think this is a great step from EMI and Apple. Now you have the choice to select the DRM-free song for a little more money. And eventually all the songs from Apple are going to be DRM-free and Steve is going to push the price back to 0.99€ as we can sure that the competitors will follow. It also looks like not all EMI songs are going to available DRM-free at first, but most of them.

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