Apple and EMI drop DRM!

In a press conference scheduled today at 1:00 p.m (London), EMI Group's Eric Nicoli and Apple's Steve Jobs announced they will start providing EMI's music without DRMs through the iTunes Store.

After a live performance by "The Good, the Bad and the Queen", Eric Nicoli entered the stage and announced a new "Premium digital downloads" offering. These premium downloads are DRM free and offer much higher encoding quality he said.

He also announced that iTunes will be the first online music retailer to offer these premium downloads before asking Steve Jobs to join the stage.

Jobs told the audience that Apple will provide the just announced offering on iTunes during May. He added that iTunes had currently 5 million songs at 128Kbit AAC quality available.

He offered details on the offer: New DRM-Free and 256Kbit quality versions of the downloads will be made available alongside current DRM'd downloads. They will cost $1.29 per song while albums will remain at the same price.

Users will also be able to upgrade their current library of EMI songs by paying the $0.30 extra.

To finish, Jobs told that Apple was working with other labels so as to make half of the iTunes' library available in the DRM Free formats by the end of the year.