Fixing everything, really slowly

EMI have announced today that will sell non-DRM protected music through iTunes. This is fantastic news for the consumer and shows that the music industry is finally begining to understand what people (I) want and what they (me) are prepared to pay for.

According to the BBC Eric Nicoli boss of EMI said today:

“We have to trust our consumers,” he said. “We have always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and convenient.”

Finally! Someone gets it! I just wish they had simplified the offering further:

bbc.co.uk

The higher price will apply only to single tracks that customers download. On iTunes EMI tracks free of digital rights management (DRM) software will cost $1.29 (99p).

Itunes users will be able to upgrade previously purchased EMI songs and albums for 30 cents (20p) a track.

[…]

All EMI albums will now be free of DRM and at the higher quality with no increase in price.

[…]

I hope they realise that charging more for the same content as an individual track, but not as an album serves only to confuse and irritate their customers. Also, why not offer existing customers a free update to the “premium” quality versions of tracks they have already bought? Why charge more for DRM free content? What makes EMI content more special than any other labels content?

I’ll be very interested to see how the other labels and music stores react to this announcement. I really hope they all follow suit and quickly. Then we can worry about the real issue in the music business: cutting out the middle man and giving musicians and consumers a fair deal. Something tells me the major labels wont be so keen to let that happen!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 @ 3:55 pm on the category Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.