“You could almost hear the sighs of relief among music downloaders when EMI agreed to be bought by private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners and not Warner Music Group,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt blogs for Business 2.0.
“After all, Warner Music, which has been trying to buy EMI for seven long years, is a staunch advocate of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent music piracy. And EMI famously broke ranks with the other big music labels in April and signed a deal with Apple to provide DRM-free music on the iTunes Music Store — a deal duplicated last week in a separate agreement with Amazon,” Elmer-DeWitt writes.
“The assumption was that if Warner got hold of EMI’s huge back list — which includes everyone from Nora Jones to the Beatles — you could kiss those DRM-free downloads goodbye,” Elmer-DeWitt writes. “But the sighs of relieve may have been premature.”
Full article here.
It’s too late to affect the DRM-free deal, isn’t it? The DRM-free EMI music is set to start being sold in May and, while the music is not yet available via Apple’s iTunes Store, there are only 9 days left in May. We’ve heard nothing from Apple (or Amazon, for that matter) that would lead us to believe that the DRM-free EMI music sales aren’t coming as promised. Once it happens, as we assume it will very soon, the toothpaste will be out of the tube.
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