EMI May Sell Entire Collection as DRM-less MP3s

BobbyJo writes "According to the Chicago Sun-Times, EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form ... without Digital Rights Management protections. According to the article, several other major music companies have considered this same route, but none as far as EMI. The reasons, of course, have nothing to do with taking a moral stand; EMI wants to compete with Apple. 'The London-based EMI is believed to have held talks with a wide range of online retailers that compete with Apple's iTunes. Those competing retailers include RealNetworks Inc., eMusic.com, MusicNet Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. People familiar with the matter cautioned that EMI could still abandon the proposed strategy before implementing it. A decision about whether to keep pursuing the idea could come as soon as today.'"

Comments

Competing with Apple???

[ryanduff]

The reasons, of course, have nothing to do with taking a moral stand; EMI wants to compete with Apple. 'The London-based EMI is believed to have held talks with a wide range of online retailers that compete with Apple's iTunes.
Not according to the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/business/media/0 9online.html:

EMI, which releases music by artists including Coldplay and the Beatles, has discussed various proposals to sell unprotected files through an array of digital retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Real Networks and Yahoo, said the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Don't be confused by the submitter's opinion. Moral reasons vs competition was mentioned nowhere in the linked Associated Press article...
In the manner of Steve Ballmer "FUD! FUD! FUD!"

Re:Recent EMI News

[Bright Apollo]

Most of you probably know all this and I'm likely just stating the obvious.

RIAA uses an old but effective technique to keep their royalties coming: information hoarding. A fully-transparent accounting of costs per CD, traced back to what the artist gets and including taxes, etc, would neuter most of the arguments or at least put them on the same playing field for fair comparisons.

Once this is done, it becomes easy to look at artist output as the sum of recording studio time plus expenses, then promotion costs, and so forth down to distribution which, then, becomes very small as a line-item cost. Once the cost components are transparent, effective arbitrage pushes these costs down as well.

-BA