Apple and EMI announced at 1pm BST today that EMI’s entire digital catalogue is going to be made available on iTunes, and other stores, without DRM from May 2007. EMI are obviously hoping that this gives them an advantage over other record companies, and Apple expect this to drive more traffic to their online store, away from their competitors. The former is a temporary advantage, because other labels will follow, and they have time to. The iTunes Store will be the first online store to sell EMI’s content DRM-free, which could cause many people to permanently switch to using iTunes.

The DRM issue that Steve Jobs raised in an open letter released in February is a trojan horse. You see, it’s not DRM that’s killing the major labels, it’s piracy carried out by those who don’t value music. I’ll say it again: it’s not DRM that’s killing the major labels, it’s low quality audio downloads. But those who don’t value music probably don’t care about low quality audio. EMI are however going to be selling their DRM-free music via iTunes at double the audio quality. But this comes at a price:

Individual tracks that are encoded at this higher quality will be more expensive: $1.29 per track, rather than $0.99. Although, curiously, entire albums will not incur the premium. You can upgrade previous purchases for the $0.30 per track difference. Furthermore, you’ll still be able to buy DRM’d content at the lower price. Can anyone not spot this as a move to higher pricing? Therefore, how does this stop piracy? The truth is that removing DRM helps Apple alone, not just in more iTunes purchases, but enabling everyone to play that music on iPods regardless of where they purchased it from. Remember – the whole purpose of the iTunes Store is to sell iPods.

The whole interoperability issue – people wanting to play all their music anywhere and on anything – is a red herring. If someone can’t be bothered to re-rip and import a DRM protected album into their player of choice, then they clearly don’t think that the effort is worth it: so the music must be poor, or maybe music just ain’t that important.

Some passing notes: What the industry needs is a wholesale replacement of the CD: this means high quality, DRM-free music with high quality artwork and readable sleeve notes. Music should be released from the confines of its CD heritage, and opened up. It’s time that music got genuinely sociable (imagine how great a last.fm / iTunes integrated store would be) and it’s time that music got decommodified.