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A couple of months ago we were telling you about EMI and their intentions to sell DRM-free digital music. Today, it was officially announced that the iTunes Store will have EMI’s entire music catalog available for purchase without DRM at $1,29 per song, while the same titles with DRM will still be available at $0.99.

People buying these songs at the iTunes Store will now be able to copy the files to any device bringing a new level of interoperability between digital music players.

“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice – the current versions of our songs for the same 99c price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30c more,” announced Jobs.
This is one of the first reactions after Steve Jobs' open letter “Thoughts on Music.” Hopefully more record labels and movie studios will follow suit in the short term, although when asked, Jobs replied video and music are two different things, hinting we probably won’t have DRM-free movies anytime soon.

The new DRM-free songs will offer a superior sound quality at 256 kbps AAC encoding, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps.