British music company EMI has announced that from May, all its songs and music videos will be available DRM-free. From the press release, it looks like they're actually doing this for the increased sales:

"By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music."

But note the use of the term "higher quality tracks" - you can get the same tracks with a lower quality for a lower price, but with them you still get DRM. So perhaps this is partly just a way to version their products so that they extract the maximum money from consumers: Rich people will buy the expensive DRM-free tracks and not need to share them with their rich friends even though they can, and poor people will buy the cheap tracks, and although they'll want to share them with their poor friends they won't be able to.

Still, this is definitely a (small) win for consumer rights.

(hat tip: TechnoLlama)

Labels: ben