EMI and iTunes to bring DRM Free Content!

Last night there was a live webcast from London, by EMI and Apple CEO his Steveness. The big announcement was that EMI, one of the big four record companies; will be bringing higher quality DRM-Free content to the iTunes Store.

I’ve always been pretty under whelmed by the 128Kbps AAC tracks that cost $0.99 on iTunes. If I’m going to pay for my music I’d like to be able to do with it what I want (just like my movies) and I’d like it to be at a decent quality. 128Kbps just isn’t cutting it for me. So, now for $0.30 more, you’ll be able to find EMI tracks without DRM encoded at 256Kbps, lets just hope they’re not transcoded. In case you don’t know what that is, transcoding is the process of converting audio from one lossy format (i.e. AAC or MP3) to another. This further degrades the quality; so an AAC file transcoded to 256Kbps from 128Kbps, will actually sound worse. And when Apple increased the resolution for video downloads last year (I think) it was found out that they just upscaled a lot of them, which causes video artifacting.

The other bonus is if you’ve already got a whole slew of EMI tracks, you’ll be able to pay the extra thirty cents and get the DRM-Free version. Album’s will also be available without DRM, but at regular prices, sounds like an incentive to buy whole albums to me. Finally, EMI music videos will also come in DRM-Free forms, without a price hike. One of the best things to be heard from all of this is that Steve Jobs expects half of the tracks available on iTunes will be DRM free in the next year.

For more info, check out Engadget’s extended coverage.