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Some are calling it the end of DRM. That’s probably going a bit far. DRM seems too lucrative in the burgeoning markets of ringtones and videos to disappear anytime soon. Still, as far as music albums go, the announcement by EMI that it would be making its entire digital catalgoue available DRM-free was incredible news. No longer would I suffer the indignity of having to track down Kylie Minogue or Robbie Williams CDs in public; I could now do it all from the privacy of my own home.

Of course I can’t quite do it just yet. Try as I might I haven’t found any online stores selling EMI music sans-DRM so far. I figure this is probably because the iTunes Store is supposed to get first bite of the cherry. In the press announcement Apple’s Steve Jobs explained that EMI’s music would appear on the iTunes Store in May so hopefully we’ll have only another month to wait.

It’s not just a lack of DRM that we can look forward to, though. The EMI announcement also foretold of a world of higher quality downloadable music. This is fantastic news for anyone who wants to replace buying CDs with downloading mp3s. At the moment most online services (including the iTunes Store) sell their music with a far lower bit rate than you would get if you ripped a CD yourself. In other words, not only are downloadable copies saddled with restrictive DRM but they’re not even as good quality as CDs. When the new songs become available, however, this will change. Jobs announced that the iTunes Store which currently sells music at a bit rate of 128 kbps would be upping that to 256 kbps.

Who wants to wait until May for all of this, though? One of the benefits of listening to the entire conference (I, er, was bored) was that I heard Eric Nicoli, Chairman of EMI, mention that music from Damon Albarn’s new band The Good, The Bad & The Queen was not only part of the digital catalogue that would be available soon but was in fact available for sale from their web site right now. This was too good an opportunity to miss and I immediately paused the press conference and availed myself of the opportunity to consume.

Although Apple will offer the new versions sans-DRM they won’t be in mp3 format. Apple eschews mp3 for their preferred alternative, AAC. It wasn’t clear to me from the press conference what we could expect from other stores as a result. If my The Good, The Bad & The Queen experience is any indication we don’t have to worry. Not only were tracks available as mp3s but they were sampled with a bir rate of 320 kbps! This is the maximum bit rate mp3 supports. It’s a little difficult to directly compare mp3 and AAC so I won’t try and start an argument about which is better, suffice to say that at this bit rate they’re both much higher quality than what we’ve had thus far.

The purchasing process was as easy as one would hope it would be. I went to the web site, clicked a few links to get to the purchase page, entered my credit card details and voila! The songs were ready for me to download. Downloading was a little bit of a pain as I had to download the songs one at a time but as the site itself pointed out, this can be remedied with a download manager (such as Flashgot).

All up the album cost me £7.99 to purchase. This works out to be a little less than AUS$20. For some of you this might not be the massive discount you were hoping digital distribution would bring. Indeed, I could probably have got the album cheaper if I’d been able to find it on sale or in a bargain bin. However, considering I a) am in Japan and b) was able to complete the purchase in all of about 5 minutes I’m hardly going to complain.

I’m hopeful prices will drop now that online services can more directly compete with one another but we’ll have to see. Frankly, for the moment I’m happy. As I said back when I started using AllofMP3, this is as much about sending a message as anything. If I really wanted the lowest possible price I could just find a torrent. But I do enjoy buying music and if EMI has now made that possible for me in the digital age then I feel they desrve my support. At least for one album.

A few things have been rattling around inside my head since the story broke. First of all, what will this mean for Apple? Jobs has been claiming since at least February that he’s been against DRM from the beginning. This seems to have had more to do with trying to get European regulators of his back than actually changing things. (In the wake of Jobs’ essay, various labels came forward to say that they had pleaded with Apple to sell their music without DRM, all to no effect.) Either way, now his wish has come true and I wonder what this means, particularly for the ludicrous price mark-ups those of us from outside the United States are charged.

As anyone with a calculator can quickly tell you, every non-American customer pays more for their music than their American brethren. Moreover, you can’t use an iTunes Store if the nationality of your credit card differs from the nationality of the store. So while I can browse the US store (and even preview files), if I try to buy any I’m told my money isn’t welcome here. So long as Apple didn’t really have to compete with online music stores (the iTunes Store dwarfs all others) this racket hummed along quite steadily. But this will no longer be the case. The Good, The Bad & The Queen didn’t care that I placed an order in their British store from Japan with my Australian credit card. I suspect the same will be true of most online stores.

And what of AAC? Plenty of devices play it back but with nothing approaching the ubiquity of mp3. Will Apple abandon AAC if people abandon the iTunes Store in favour of mp3?

And what of video? Apple says music and video are different but don’t the same interoperable arguments apply to it as well as music? Especially with the growth of portable video players, whether they be an added extra with your new BMW sports utility vehicle or part of your latest cell phone, Joe Consumer is going to want to be able to transfer video between devices. Presumably people will be as pissed off when they realise all those Pixar movies they bought to entertain Junior on the trip to Grandma’s won’t work as they were when they found out Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ was trapped on their PC. (Possibly more pissed off since the films will have cost ten times as much.) DRM might make sense for rental video but if purchasing online truly starts to take off and DVD sales continue to slide, what then?

Finally, what does this all mean for Big Content? The decision to ditch DRM by EMI seems to be a further step towards fully embracing a radically different distribution model to the one that has made all these companies filthy rich. But while many may see this as the final nail in the coffin for Digital Rights Management it seems to me to be one more nail in the coffin of the entertainment industry as we know it. Are we going to need record stores any more? Are we going to need record labels? If The Good, The Bad & The Queen can sell their music to me directly what exactly is EMI providing them with again?