Forgive my use of Fox/CNNs favourite copout but it looks at thought this may be a significant step towards more sane times. At least in regards to buying music. EMI and Apple have announced that they will be making music available through the iTunes store free of DRM.
For those that aren’t familiar with DRM or don’t really understand that the ramifications of this decision are I will explain. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, it is encompasses many means that content providers use to restrict how you, the customer, use digital content. In music, this is most often used to prevent you from making a copy and “lending” it to your friends. But as a result also prevents you from lending music to yourself, if you have music that plays on your iPod, it won’t play on your Zune (hypothetical situation, you lose your iPod and decided to try the Zune, or more likely vice versa.) Nor can you play it in your MP3 enabled car. There are ways around DRM but if you live in the United States or another country with similar laws to the DMCA you are committing a crime when you do this. In Canada we have no such laws but it is an annoyance and a slap in the face. Now that you have a little background let’s get back to the story.
Certainly this is cause for celebration but some of you may be wondering, “What’s the catch?” You’d be certainly warranted in your caution, but it’s not so bad, the price of the music goes from $0.99 (USD) per song to $1.29 (USD). While this may seem bad wait a minute before you protest. In order to appease the masses that will definitely be upset with a 30 cent increase in price they’d also thrown in an additional 128 bit… rates… (ok that doesn’t quite work.) Apple has increased the sound quality two fold, from 128 Kbit/s to 256 Kbit/s. In audio terms this is from “eh” quality to almost no difference from CD quality, good enough for all but the most serious audiophiles. You’ll experience the rumbling lows and the piercing highs on your stereo equipment (be it in your home or your car) that you may have found previous songs form the iTunes store to be lacking.
The only real downside I can see is that EMI will not be replacing their DRM enabled music, rather the new DRM free and slightly more expensive but higher quality music will be sold along side with the lower quality, less expensive, crippled music. I can understand their position in this decision in that they are testing the waters, they are after all the first large music label in States to be doing this. I suspect they will eventually move over all the way once they see their sales increasing (personal prediction based on the truthiness)
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Weird Al, (was) a household name in parody (in the 90s,) has released his new single “
