EMI takes locks off music tracks

 

Music giant EMI is taking software locks off its digital music sold via download sites such as iTunes.

 

The "premium" versions of EMI tracks will lack the digital locks common to songs available via many online sites.

 

The move is significant because most download sites currently try to limit piracy by restricting what people can do with music they buy.

 

Apple's iTunes store will start selling the EMI tracks in the "premium" format in May, with other services to follow.

 

EMI, the world's third-biggest record label, said every song in its online catalogue will be available in the "premium" format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now.

 

EMI/ITUNES PRICES

79p single - with digital locks and at 128kbps quality

99p single - no digital locks and 256kbps quality

Album prices unchanged with no locks and all at 256kbps

 

Popular EMI artists include Lily Allen, Joss Stone, Robbie Williams, Coldplay and Corinne Bailey Rae.

 

Contrary to early speculation there was no announcement about music from the Beatles going online in any format.

 

On iTunes EMI tracks free of digital rights management (DRM) software with twice the audio quality will cost $1.29 (99p). Itunes users will be able to upgrade previously purchased EMI songs and albums for 30 cents (20p) a track.

 

Apple will continue to sell DRM-protected versions of music tracks, including those from EMI, for 99 cents (79p).

 

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

 

"Consumers tell us they would be prepared to pay a higher price for a piece of music they can play on any player," said EMI boss Eric Nicoli at a press conference in London.

 

Mr Nicoli said the move did not diminish EMI's fight against piracy. DRM has been hailed by some in the industry as the most effective way to stop illicit copying.

 

"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."

 

Mr Nicoli said EMI was still in discussions with Apple Records over the use of Beatles songs online.

 

Apple boss Steve Jobs shared the platform with Mr Nicoli and said: "This is the next big step forward in the digital music revolution - the movement to completely interoperable DRM-free music."

 

He added: "The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today."

 

Analyst Mark Mulligan, with Jupiter Research, said the announcement "changes not just the rules of the game, but the game itself".

 

He said: "It's a reflection that EMI is in a more difficult situation than the rest of the record labels - they have to gamble.

 

"It's the right move but it's a limited gamble; about 5% of the music market is online."

 

He said he expected the other record labels and online retailers to follow suit in due course.

 

"Other retail partners have to come to the party because they can't be seen to be offering an inferior product."

 

The move means that consumers will be able to move music tracks between different music players at will. For example, EMI songs bought via iTunes could be played on iPods and other players too.

 

Although this is possible today it typically involves converting downloaded tracks into neutral formats - which often means a loss of quality.

 

Other record companies would soon follow EMI's lead, predicted Mr Jobs.

 

He said the more than half of all the tracks available in the iTunes store would be available DRM-free by the end of the year.

 

In January Mr Jobs issued an open letter to the music industry calling on it to abandon DRM.

 

Although DRM is designed to thwart pirates by limiting how many copies people can make of tracks and where they can play them, critics argue that it goes further than the law allows and punishes innocent consumers.

 

Mr Jobs said the move to remove DRM on music was not a precursor to a similar step in the video market.

 

"The music and video markets are not parallel. The video industry does not deliver 90% of its content DRM-free."

 

He denied that the 99p cost for tracks without DRM constituted a price increase.

 

"We are adding another product, priced higher, with more features, higher sound quality and hassle free interoperability.

 

"It's not a price increase."

 

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/6516189.stm

[Article] At last, music is the winner

 

 

The Beatles, whose songs are still not legally available for download, are the aces in EMI's pocket.

 

EMI's bold new move to unlock its music to the digital masses is

the wildcard in the poker game of legal downloads.

 

There's an unlimited supply/And there is no reason why/I tell you it was all a frame/They only did it 'cos of fame/Who?/EMI

EMI by the Sex Pistols

 

THE entire music establishment has practically detonated for real since Johnny Rotten lobbed that parting grenade over the wall of Britain's most distinguished music company, EMI, in 1977.

 

The "unlimited supply" of cash from those decadent glory days is now slipping like ash through the fingers of the last four major music conglomerates. Who'd have guessed that 30 years on, the label that dismissed the Sex Pistols for their ratbag behaviour would out-punk them all?

 

EMI has been conspiring in anarchic circles of late. The venerable parent company kept a low profile while its flagship renegades, the Beatles, hatched their mysterious agreement with Apple Computers in February - with specifics still to be announced.

 

Then, last week, chief executive Eric Nicoli moved into the media spotlight after settling EMI's ancient, $72 million royalties dispute with the Fab litigants.

 

Coincidence? Perhaps.

 

When Mr Nicoli and Apple boss Steve Jobs called their joint press conference in London on April 2, many assumed that it was to announce the Beatles' dramatically overdue debut on Apple's iTunes online music service (5 million songs for sale, and still only the 10 solo stragglers by Ringo).

 

The news, as it happened, was much bigger.

 

From May 1, EMI is withdrawing its defences in the online war against piracy. Beginning with iTunes, the company is "making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions".

 

It's nothing less than anarchy in the UK - and in every other country with broadband access. The other three major music corporations (Universal, SonyBMG and Warner) are likely to be livid at the audacity of those punks over at EMI.

 

While some industry pundits are predicting a domino effect among the other three majors, that's far from certain given the stubborn culture of protectionism that has arguably been their undoing since they went to war with the then-illegal music site Napster at the turn of the century.

 

Since then, the implementation of flawed and frustrating DRM locks has made buying music online far less attractive than it should have been. In effect, DRM penalises all MP3 fans as de facto criminals. The resulting antagonism has probably exacerbated the piracy pandemic the majors are so desperate to contain.

 

But EMI's unilateral surrender means that, for once, music is the winner.

 

Removing DRM encryption from the new "premium" song downloads means that the Pink Floyd or Coldplay song you buy on iTunes is yours to keep and copy as many times as you want to any digital device - not just the Apple iPod, as currently dictated by the company's proprietary "FairPlay" DRM system.

 

And "much higher sound quality" means that audiophiles no longer need to be insulted by the MP3-quality definition that has made online retail such a poor option for discerning music fans. EMI's premium downloads will be encoded at 256 kilobits of information per second, which is twice the definition of standard online/MP3 fodder and comparable to CD fidelity.

 

On iTunes, and presumably the other services yet to negotiate with EMI, premium downloads will come at a premium price. You can still buy regular 128 kbps/DRM downloads for $1.69 a track, but should you choose to pay $2.20 (or thereabouts - precise Australian pricing is yet to be announced), you are offered better sound and greater interoperability, whether you fancy the Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Gorillaz, Kylie Minogue, Keith Urban, Robbie Williams or a fat wad of other EMI acts. But not the Beatles. Not yet, anyway, despite the recent settlements with Apple and EMI.

 

But wait, there's a steak-knives clause. Buy the whole album instead of individual tracks and you will pay a regular price for the premium product. That's a low, low $1.69, multiplied by the number of tracks on the album, and every song is yours to keep at CD quality to copy for your own use ad infinitum.

 

All we need now is an imaginative artwork delivery model and even obstinately album-oriented holdouts such as Radiohead might be tempted to start licensing their conspicuously absent masterpieces to online retailers such as iTunes, Zune, emusic and the rest.

 

Of course, all of this is merely fair play (as opposed to FairPlay) to those who liked the old system when records and CDs were engineered to exacting hi-fi standards in the first place and were indisputably owned by the purchaser upon sale and playable on any system forever and ever - until someone trashed it at a party or stole it from your schoolbag.

 

But it's life-affirming news for the more paranoid among us who had begun to envisage an Orwellian reality in which music would be compacted into muzak, hardwired into our Telescreens, and only rented back for limited use if we bought regulation equipment from the iMinistry - and then bought the same equipment again when the battery died a few years later.

 

But the beneficiaries of that scenario would have been few. None of the majors, for starters, have exactly been copping it sweet in the brave new world of digital distribution. In Australia, online music sales registered a four-fold increase last year but still account for only 5.5 per cent of total music sales. And that total is in steep decline, perhaps due to piracy or a wider variety of leisure activities such as computer games.

 

So who is Big Brother? Having sold 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs through iTunes, it's clearly Apple boss Steve Jobs and Apple Computers who have been snickering loudest behind the ubiquitous Telescreen.

 

It was therefore highly pertinent when, two months ago, Mr Jobs published an eloquent online essay titled Thoughts on Music in which he made a compelling case for the abolition of DRM in music retail.

 

Apple has taken some flak for its FairPlay DRM system and even weathered charges of anti-competitive practices in Europe, but Mr Jobs took the opportunity to remind his critics that it was the four music majors who together "control the distribution of over 70 per cent of the world's music" and who insisted on DRM locks before they would license their music to online stores.

 

Naturally, no company will share its DRM secrets with another. Hence the absurd situation in which tracks bought from Microsoft's Zune store play only on Zune players, while the same tracks from Sony's Connect store play only on Sony players, iTunes play only on iPods and so on.

 

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats," Mr Jobs suggested. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music that is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat." He also provided a good reason why the four major music companies should acquiesce: "Because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

 

As Mr Jobs points out, last year the DRM-protected download market made up only 10 per cent of all songs sold.

 

"So if the music companies are selling over 90 per cent of their music DRM-free (on CDs), what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system (legal downloads)? There appear to be none."

 

Another way to look at this is to think about the average MP3 player. The hard drives are usually full to bursting with music but only a tiny percentage has been bought on legal download sites. The rest has been pirated or ripped from CDs.

 

This is the prevailing state of lunacy that EMI has apparently now been the first major label to acknowledge.

 

In truth, its radical new online strategy looks more like an act of desperation than a progressive rethink of DRM. It's perhaps best understood as a gallant attempt to kick-start the shiny new vehicle (online retail) before the wheels fall off the terminally ill one (CD retail) while hopefully closing the gap on its rivals in the same cavalier manoeuvre.

 

It's no secret that EMI has been hit particularly hard in these troubled times. Since 2000, there have been recurring stories of proposed mergers and takeover bids. Just last month Warner was in the news cited as a potential buyer of the music giant. But as a vociferous believer in DRM, one can safely assume Warner has lost interest in the acquisition.

 

Nonetheless, Mr Jobs is confident that EMI's provocative policy shift will lead to more than half the total iTunes catalogue being DRM-free by the end of this year. If he's right, the logic of market competition suggests that within a year most music for sale online will sound as good as technically possible, will be owned in perpetuity by those who pay for it and will be easily copied illegally by those who don't.

 

Which would roughly take us back to where we were 30 years ago when music came on vinyl, we stole it freely on cassette while the Sex Pistols were still burning through a supposedly unlimited supply of record company cash. That's progress, right?

 

Not really. But in a poker game that's been stacking up all wrong in recent years, EMI's bold new premium downloads concept has thrown all the cards in the air and made bets for the future of digital music anything but predictable.

 

Whatever these EMI/iTunes punks have up their sleeves next, odds are high that it will involve their four sequestered aces: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Most pundits see a premium iTunes issue as inevitable, but that alone would be small change for the greatest musical asset that ever roamed the pop charts.

 

More compelling is widespread speculation about a dedicated Beatles iPod, the world's first preloaded digital music device, which could marry musical hardware and software in the most attractive and technically advanced package since the compact disc.

 

There's certainly something suspiciously timely about these three goliaths of modern music - the Beatles, Apple Computers and EMI - choosing to settle decades of complex litigation just weeks before June 1: the gala 40th anniversary of the most famous, popular and revolutionary album of all time, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 

Listen closely and you can almost hear Johnny Rotten's canny conspiracy theory ringing through the ages: "I tell you it was all a frame." Maybe EMI only did it, once again, for the media attention that has been so eminently forthcoming.

 

Another dramatic press release is doubtless in the drafting stages. Right now, the pop group, the computer company and the record company of the moment are playing their collective cards close to their chests.

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/digital-music/at-last-music-is-the-winner/2007/04/18/1176696844562.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2