The Good The Bad And The Queen Apple

EMI have announced the introduction of higher quality DRM-less MP3's on the iTunes Music Store for £0.99. DRM encased MP4's will remain on sale at the traditional price of £0.79.

The Good

Higher Quality EMI MP3s will be available and will not feature copy protection (DRM).

EMI Music Videos will also be available at the same price without the copy protection.

A 256kbps DRM-less album will cost the same as an album encoded at 128kbps with DRM

This is the first concrete step by a major label towards a new legal digital music environment. Free us from paranoid copy protection please.

EMI's competitors (Sony, Warner and Universal) are likely to be under unstoppable pressure to follow suit. Independent labels are already able to sell DRM-less tracks on eMusic and so it is likely they will strike similar deals with iTunes.



The Bad

Customers will have to pay £0.99 for each of these 'premium' downloads.

I have bought the whole Joss Stone and Air albums already at 128kbps, can I upgrade for free as I bought the whole album? Can I upgrade my Robbie Videos for free?

The Beatles catalog is still not legally available online.

The Apple Queen



We tried out the new some of these 'Higher Quality' MP3's by buying EMI's first offering, The Good The Bad And The Queen (TGTBATQ). Ironically this album is available on the bands website via an iTunes rival, 7digital.

TGTBATQ is actually not the name of the band, its the name of the album. Damon decided it was stupid for them to have an actual name because they were all rock orphans from somewhere or another (Blur, Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley, The Verve, The Clash...)



You can tell the difference between 'premium' MP3's and the normal ones. Its not mind blowing though, for the most part 128kbps is completely adequate for most people. Funbongo recently spoke to someone in the 'industry' and he mentioned that they felt people were concerned about the sound quality of their legal MP3 collection. Really? I haven't met anyone that genuinely finds 128kpbs a problem or not up to scratch.

It seems to me like an excuse to justify hiking up the prices and reducing the potential revenue loss from piracy. 'Lets rip those off music fans who already use iTunes a little'. They should have offered the all the MP3s without the copy protection. This would be a more genuine and positive move.



Funbongo would have been far more impressed if the DRM was stripped from £0.79 downloads as well. The restriction is still there, you can only purchase liberated MP3 if you are pretentious enough to pay more and fit into Steve Job's invisible class of 'audiophiles'.



Although this development falls short of what we had hoped it is certainly a fantastic move; three cheers for EMI and Apple. You have uncuffed one of the hands of legal music downloading. We predict that over the next few years these new offerings will become normalised across all internet music stores, regardless of record company affiliation. Once we have reached that stage the pressure will increase uncontrollably to abolish DRM altogether. The extinction of DRM was a bridge to far today. lets all hold hands, share iPod headphones and listen to 256kbps encoded music without the devilish copy protection. John Legend, I mean John Lennon would be proud.

Download The Good The Bad and The Queen (Premium Edition) here

EMI Press Release


PS The Good The Bad and The Queen LP is quite good.