EMI & I-Tunes make things Interesting

From the Washington Post today:

EMI Records, the home record label of such bands as The Beatles, (They’re gonna go places, they’re good!) has made an agreement with Apple & i-Tunes to begin releasing higher quality music files without the DRM lock. For those of you who don’t know DRM is essentially the thing that “locks” your music files from i-Tunes and prevents them from being played on any device you want. With in the next few weeks EMI will release and re-issue these DRM free tracks at 256K bps in the i-tunes AAC format. Normal locked i-Tunes files are 128K bps AAC format.

However access to these new files will come at a price. EMI will still continue to offer locked 128K bps files at the standard rate of $0.99 on i-Tunes but the new file format will cost you $1.29. But then again that’s a steal for twice the sound quality and total control over the file. In addition for those who already own EMI released song files there will an option of “upgrading” the song files by paying the additional $0.30. According to many in the industry they see this new file format as a sign of the impending release of the entire Beatles catalogue on i-Tunes in the coming days and/or weeks. And for that I say FINALLY!!!…… Then again I already own the entire Beatles catalogue on CD. (Maybe EMI could work on re-issuing remastered versions of the Beatles Catalogue as well!)

And for those of you not up to date on this new hot act out of England (The Beatles, silly!) Here’s a clip from a local live performance…. The kinda sounds like that 60s super group “The Monkees”!

(OK seriously, we here at PCWIE are HUGE Beatles fans, just having a little fun. The clip is from the Famous Rooftop “concert” in 1969 (I think)).