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Apple and EMI plan to announce a ground-breaking step tomorrow morning where EMI plans to release a significant portion of their catalogue without DRM protection.

Steve Jobs had argued a few weeks ago that music companies were releasing their entire CD colletion without any protection, while they forced DRM onto all MP3 sellers. A user could take a CD and make a DRM-free MP3 in a few minutes, therefore making most music sold unprotected:

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Apple has been under pressure from European countires and advocate groups to open up their system, but due to requirements from the music labels, they had no choice. Steve’s obvious suggestion was to have all music companies drop their DRM requirements.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

This is a great step forward, as currently, if you purchase music through the iTunes store, you are tied to that system, your music cannot go on a non-Apple player. It will be interesting to see if the other major follow with similar changes.

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