Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording company, has finally made the decision to start selling DRM-free music, but unlike EMI, they will be doing this on a trial basis for a limited time and with certain selection of artists. Universal will make thousands of albums available for purchase from several online music download services as well as on the recording artists' Websites. One of these includes Amazon.com's new music service, which will only sell DRM-free music.
As an attempt to potentially weaken iTunes' massive market sure, it will not make any DRM-free tracks available through iTunes. They also plan doing this as a control to see what effect making DRM-free music available on other stores has on sales, pricing and piracy. However, as the tracks will be made available in the popular MP3 format, which is compatible with the iPod, iPod owners would be able to buy DRM-free Universal tracks from another store without any issue loading them on their player. The tracks are expected to sell in a variety of bit rates for $0.99 per track and will be made available from August 21st to January 31st.
With Universal taking this unusual approach to trialling DRM-free music, it will be interesting to see if iTunes customers interested in Universal's tracks made available DRM-free would be willing to jump to competitors just to get the DRM-free versions, at least without resorting to piracy. From what I can see, for users who have no idea what DRM is and only ever use an iPod, they will likely go with the convenience of using iTunes as usual. However, despite Apple interested in doing away with DRM, it looks like Universal's move has backfired at Apple by only offering their DRM-free music elsewhere.
Further information can be read at this source Taipei Times article.
