A couple weeks ago, EMI announced that it will begin offering DRM-free tracks in MP3, AAC, and WMA format. Apple jumped on the announcement, immediately confirming that they will sell these tracks on iTunes. Of course, they’ll charge 30% more for them—$1.29 per track instead of 99 cents—and you can “upgrade” your existing purchases for the 30-cent difference. Curiously, nobody asked EMI if the musicians well get 30% more money from these purchases (it’s all about supporting the artists, right?), but I’m guessing they won’t. I always thought 99 cents per track was a rip-off: It’s what you pay for music on CD, which is often criticized for an outrageous markup. The RIAA claims the markup is necessary because the albums that sell well pay for the printing, ad-vertising, in-store placement, and other costs associated with CDs that don’t sell well. In the world of digital downloads, music that doesn’t sell doesn’t cost any manufacturing or distribu-tion money, so why do the winners pay for the losers there, too? Of course, they’re bumping up the anemic 128k bitrate on iTunes songs to 256k on these unprotected tracks, so at least there’s that.
A few days later, a Microsoft rep on the Zune team, Katy Asher, said, “The EMI announce-ment on Monday was not exclusive to Apple. Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want. We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it.” She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers. That’s not exactly a formal announcement of DRM-free music on the Zune marketplace, but it’s about as close as you can get. I’m willing to bet it’ll start off with EMI tracks and a bunch of indie labels. Zune songs are already higher than 128k, but there’s no telling whether they’ll go higher than the 192k already in use.
That’s all good, right? Except for the price, and my suspicion that artists aren’t going to see any more money from these higher-priced tracks, that is. Finally we have some “fair use”-compliant downloads from a major record label. Hooray for the death of DRM!
Except it’s not the death of lock-out content. I read an interesting editorial recently about how awful the structure of Guitar Hero II is. The game advertises 70 songs and calls out some big hits by name, but you can’t play them when you buy the game. First, you have to beat the first “set” of five songs, plus an encore, to unlock the next set of five. If you’re an un-skilled player, you might never get to play Free Bird or Hangar 18. You have to suffer through Heart if you want to play Stray Cats. That sort of makes sense for the career mode, but in order to play these songs in Practice or Free Play mode, you have to first unlock them in Career mode.
Related
- Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songs
- Zune vs. Creative Commons: Good news for reverse engineers?
- Amazon set to launch online music store
- Microsoft sees DRM-free music in Zune’s future
- eMusic intros UK MP3 download service
