Several months of rumors and speculations are confirmed: music giant EMI will start selling DRM-free music, offering its repertoire first on Apple’s iTunes. Here’s an excerpt from the official press release:

“EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions”.

The important point to note here is the “much higher sound quality” part. This means that EMI isn’t just going to offer DRM-free MP3’s, they’re going to add value to their content by offering music with much better sound quality than your average MP3 (and the difference is definitely audible, especially on decent audio systems - contrary to what some parts of the music industry are trying to convince you).

The retailers will be able to choose formats as they please: AAC, WMA, MP3 are all go. The pricing will be as follows:

“Apple’s iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI’s new premium downloads. Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied”.

Here’s another snippet from the press release worth looking at:

“EMI Music will continue to employ DRM as appropriate to enable innovative digital models such as subscription services (where users pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music), super-distribution (allowing fans to share music with their friends) and time-limited downloads (such as those offered by ad-supported services)”.

So, EMI is not ditching DRM altogether. I’d say that the real reason is all this being somewhat of a test to see whether selling DRM-free music works or not (and by works I mean bring huge amounts of money to the music industry). I reckon that, if all goes well, after a while they will simply switch to DRM-free music completely.

As I’ve said in the post below, this is a very important step forward that will give an entirely new shape to the digital music market - and it’s definitely a step in the right direction.