Brave first steps

Massive, huge, gargantuan news people! EMI, one of the biggest music publishing companies in the world, has taken a brave step forward and is allowing its music to be sold online without DRM encoding built into the tracks. DRM (or Digital Rights Management) is a copyright protection feature enforced by all major labels when selling their musical wares online. It’s a restrictive piece of encoding that puts many people (myself included) off purchasing digital music online. Only downside is the slight increased price ($1.30, as opposed to $0.99 per track). But to offset this, songs will be encoded at a higher quality :D If this takes off, there’s a good chance that the rest of the major publishers will follow suit.