COPY PROTECTION: Big record labels change their tune
Province
NEW YORK — Apple Inc. has reached a deal with major record labels to sell digital songs without the copyprotection software that had prevented fans from sharing music bought from its iTunes store, the maker of the iPod and iPhone said yesterday.
The company also said it would start selling over-the-air download songs for its popular iPhone 3G and introduce variable pricing at the iTunes Music Store, with songs priced at 82 cents, $1.18 and $1.54 starting in April.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice-president of marketing, announced the longexpected changes at the Macworld Expo trade show in San Francisco.
Copy-protection software, also known as digital-rights management, has proved a controversial topic with music fans and record labels alike.
DRM was designed to prevent fans from illegally sharing digital downloads on file-sharing services. But it also prevented many fans from moving their own songs between devices and became increasingly unpopular.
Apple founder Steve Jobs publicly called on major record labels to drop DRM in February 2007. But the labels had resisted his call, even though iTunes is the world’s biggest digitalmusic retailer, with more six billion songs sold since 2003.
The labels had agreed to allow other retailers, including Amazon.com and Napster, to sell DRM-free songs in a bid to help increase competition. ITunes has more than 70 per cent of the digital-music market in the U.S.
ITunes will offer all 10 million songs free of digital rights management by the end of the quarter, Schiller said.
The DRM-free songs will be sold as higher-quality 256-kilobyte-per-second AAC encoding for better audio quality. Most DRM-free songs are sold in the more popular MP3 format.