Many users were quite happy when Apple announced that they would be selling drm free music at their iTunes online store. It would finally be possible to make one purchase and be able to play the music in your car, mp3 player, computer and other devices. Prices for the drm free music were set higher than for music with drm which did not get the bad feedback that I expected it to get.

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Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I’m a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.

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The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

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EzTakes is a movie store that offers DRM free DVD downloads. You may watch and burn the downloaded DVD movies as often as you want without restrictions or additional payments. The format of the movies is the standard DVD format with a VIDEO_TS folder. DVD Covers and prints will be downloaded automatically as well completing the movie download process. Most other movie stores, like Amazon Unbox, restrict usage of the downloaded movie files and make it impossible to burn the movies on DVDs that can be watched using a standalone DVD player.

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I’m sick and tired. Sick and tired of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, their methods, their pressure against their customers, their inability to cope with a new situation, their stubbornness and their greed. Instead of listening to their customers and possible customers they cling to their old ways of distribution and show an unbelievable ineffectiveness to cope with new technologies and ways of spreading music.

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