Just a few hours ago, Apple and EMI announced the availability of DRM-free, high bitrate tracks on Apples iTunes Store. One thing is certain: Today’s announcement is an important milestone for the media industries, but it also sets a precedent as the first major offering that disentangles technical restrictions of media and consumer rights. This announcement reveals the multi pronged approach taken by Apple to cater both for those that refuse to pay for DRM’ed music and those that wish higher quality encoding while luring the recording industry. The Apple-EMI offerings are bound to attract more customers to the iTunes Store, people that really care about the quality and can discern the difference between low-quality AAC 128Kbit files and higher quality encoded music or lossless encodings such as PCM found on CDs, DSD on SACDs etc. Moreover, the increased file size of the higher quality tracks, that might have been a problem five or six years ago, is not particularly important anymore to the vast majority of Apple’s iTS customers: 256Kbit files, although twice as large as their 128kbit counterparts, are nothing compared to — commonly downloaded — MPEG4/H264 (and variants) video clips and movies from YouTube/Google Video or peer to peer programs. This multi pronged approach will be certainly leveraged by Apple to help ‘convince’ other major record labels to abandon their elaborate DRM schemes through increased sales. The fact that EMI is the first major record company to abandon DRM is not surprising. First of all, it is the smallest of the big four and to date is not part of a large multinational group, as is the case for example with Sony BMG, Warner or Universal. It is, as such, the most suitable candidate for the DRM-less experiment and perhaps the easiest to convince. Secondly, it owns a wide-range of ‘classics’, music that people still listen to, despite it being several decades old. Whatever happens with the iTS now will be very closely monitored by everyone, including Apple’s competitors of course.
When Jobs wrote his open letter back in early February I was quick to dismiss it as wishful thinking. The reason was that is looked backwards and not forwards whenever Jobs wished to invoke statistics. It was honest, yet misleading. For example, it mentioned that an order of magnitude more CDs are sold each year than digital downloads and that since CDs have no DRM protection schemes, the music was out there anyway. This, while factually correct, is not exactly news either to the record companies or to consumers. What consumers are afraid of — and record companies certainly wish for — is a post-CD era, when digital downloads would not be dwarfed by CD sales and when DRM-music would be the norm. Obviously, such a time would be at least ten or fifteen years away, and considering the quality deficiencies of lossy compression (at least for the music genres where this actually matters) it might be even longer. I’ll admit now that the simultaneous announcement of high-bitrate AAC files and DRM free music, promises a very different landscape indeed. And today’s announcement is what makes EMI Jobs’ Trojan Horse in liberating music from DRM and, if he succeeds, the beginning of a new era, defined by the lack of DRM and the gradual obsolescence of the Compact Disc.