The announcement went out on April 1: Apple Computers and EMI Group had scheduled a press conference for April 2 and the announcement was going to be "historic." It was April 1, after all, and there had been rumors swirling about for months that Apple Computers and Apple Corp. had settled their trademark differences as a first step to a bigger display of collaboration. I forwarded the announcement to Jon Iverson under the heading "April Fool's Joke or Genuine Press Release?"
Iverson replied with the URLs of several other hoax announcements.
We were both wrong. At 8:38am April 2, I received a press release that stated: "Apple today announced that EMI Music's entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256kbps AAC (advanced audio coding) encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30¢ a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99¢ per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available."
The release went on to say: "With DRM-free music from the EMI catalog, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favorite EMI artists without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. DRM-free songs purchased from the iTunes Store will be encoded in AAC at 256kbps, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps, and will play on all iPods, Mac or Windows computers, Apple TVs, and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players."
That sounds very much like what many of us had been asking for all along: a choice of greater resolution, albeit at a price, and portability from one platform to the next. Pundits immediately linked the EMI announcement to Steve Jobs' famous "Imagine" open letter. Jobs struck a blow for musical freedom and the next thing you know, one of the Big Three had unshackled the music! Cue: heroic music.
But wait a minute. Why AAC files, instead of uncompressed WAV files (like Music Giants) or even lossless-compressed ALC files? And what about the Beatles—aren't they part of the EMI catalog?
The AAC part of the equation is simple, from Apple's point of view: It's their format. Now, when AAC uses DRM—which Apple calls FairPlay—the PDP world is divided pretty much into Apple and everybody else. Non-FairPlay–encoded AAC, on the other hand is very close to being as universal as MP3 —it will even play on Microsoft's Zune players (for the "16 people who own one," in Business Week writer Arik Hesseldahl's deliciously snarky turn of phrase).
Hesseldahl's analysis is that "unshackling" EMI content gave Apple ammunition for battling the EU's anti-trust allegations: The labels made us do it only works if at least one label doesn't. Furthermore, Hessendahl says, the real target is Microsoft. "All of those companies that have been 'partners' of Microsoft—Samsung, Creative, Archos, and SanDisk, to name a few—have been treated pretty poorly by Redmond recently. Before the Zune, Microsoft had a branding program called 'PlaysForSure' that was intended to indicate wide-ranging compatibility. Buy a song on Napster, or Yahoo, or MTV Networks' (VIA) URGE, or any one of a score of other online music stores, and it was guaranteed to play on devices with the PlaysForSure brand. (Some people had another phrase for it, which I won't reproduce here, but the third word rhymed with 'bit.')"
But when Microsoft launched the Zune and Zune Marketplace, "walking away from PlaysFor Sure," Hesseldahl argues, it didn't endear itself to its partners. The ones that support AAC, "will be only too proud to brag on their packaging that they are, at least in some limited way, compatible with iTunes."
It's possible that Redmond was reading Business Week: "The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple," said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an email to IDG News Service on April 6. Microsoft, Asher said, had been talking with EMI and other record labels "for some time now" about removing DRM restrictions on Zune players and Zune Marketplace. "Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want. We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it."
According to an article on Timesonline.co.uk, EMI declined to comment on the speculation, though it reiterated that iTunes was just one of a number of digital music stores from which it anticipated selling DRM-free tracks 'in the coming weeks.'"
All righty then, either Steve Jobs or EMI or, possibly, even Microsoft has been leading the campaign to unlock DRM on music files. But what about that persistent Beatles rumor? Still a rumor, but conspiracy theorists, having proven that Paul is indeed dead, point to Jobs' iPhone introduction in January, where the slide of an iPhone prominently displayed the cover of Sgt. Pepper's. A harbinger of deals to come or just wishful thinking? Stay tuned—if we were going to bet, we'd note that it has been 20 years since the Beatles catalog was released on CD (and it has not been re-mastered in all that time since then 'til now) and that the impending 40th anniversary of Pepper's on June 1, 2007 might make an opportune occasion for a joint announcement.
What we do know is that EMI's decision to be the first major label to remove digital restrictions from its whole catalog seems like a step in the right direction. Yes, we'd prefer Red Book resolution, but offering higher rez (albeit not that much higher) and cross-platform portability are rights we've been demanding from the get-go. It's a courageous step for EMI and it could represent a giant leap for music lovers.
