Journal: News & Comment

The death of DRM

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Stop those stopped presses! Digital restrictions (or, euphemistically, "rights") management (DRM) has always sucked. Today's announcement that EMI and Apple will release higher-quality, DRM-free music for a slightly higher price at the iTunes Music Store ($1.29 instead of 99 cents) is great, great news, and what I hope is the first sign of the death of DRM.

Even cooler is that when the new tracks go on sale in May, there will apparently be upgrade pricing (only 30 cents, I hope) from your existing DRM-crippled EMI songs. I plan to budget for upgrading anything from EMI I've already bought from iTunes, and as soon as other labels make it possible I'll do that for them too.

In addition, since I've now sold out all physical CDs of my album, being able to offer the digital download from iTunes without DRM for people who'd like to buy my music there (and I hope it will be easy for me to do that) makes my day.

Good move, Apple and EMI. Death to DRM!

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