Not too sure about all this stuff, DRM Free is a good move, and also seeing the quality increase to 256K AAC is pretty good. Now the downside, the price hike from 79p to 99p for what they are calling premium versions. To start with they will be offering an upgrade option for the EMI tracks you already own, of course your gonna have to pay extra for that also.

The whole way through they kept mentioning that they are not offering anything that is not available already on CD. So lets look at the case for CD, you can get a CD cheaper from Amazon than buying the download, you get whatever quality you want to encode the tracks at, all the tracks are DRM free, you get a nice CD and case and art work. You can play your CD on your Hi-Fi car stereo etc… if your iPod or other player or computer gets stolen you can just re-encode from the CD.

CD is the clear winner, downloads only represent a small percentage of the market and the CD offers better quality and all the options you want. So why are they all going mad about advertising downloads? Well the record companies can make more money by getting rid of the overhead of physical media and distribution costs and keeping them for themselves, they can sell you a compressed format and a few years later offer you a better quality for a new price. The only store that had the right idea for downloads is Warp Records that have been offering all bitrate qualities including Lossless formats and all DRM free for the same price and a few pence more for the CD. They have been doing this for years and seems like the best thing to be doing. With the huge amounts of storage and large amounts of bandwidth we have lossless shouldn’t be a problem.

Buy the CD in the first place and you can have it anyway you want it for less!

Don’t get me wrong this is a great new step but CD is still king!