Steve Jobs, CEO Apple and Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group announce that you can buy DRM-free and higher quality (buying albums is the same price for the higher quality).

These undeniable improvements in the music come at a price: Apple and EMI will charge 30% more for the higher quality DRM-free music. EMI doesn’t seem to have incurred any increased costs and yet it is charging more for the product they should have provided in the first place. Obviously, they point out we have the ‘choice’ not to buy this music.

Jobs believes music should be set DRM-free and that it is record labels who have been stopping this. What about video? Apple is on the board of Disney and is CEO of Pixar, surely he is in a good position to extend the DRM-free revolution to video?… Steve says the comparison isn’t valid and that video has DRM routinely and that therefore this change doesn’t apply to video. This seems to be an attitude that suits his interests more than reflect reality. The provision of DRM-free video would allow the same sort of uses that he advocates for music (transfer across mediums and being technology free).

The conventional wisdom is that the sales of iPods and music from iTMS is linked. People buy iPods so they can buy music from iTMS and vice versa. The beauty of the system is that once a customer is seduced by a pretty iPod they start filling it up with music from iTMS, should another music player (from a different manufacturer) take their fancy the iTMS music is difficult to transfer (Steve Jobs in the press conference suggested nothing has changed users used to be able to burn CDs and then re-rip and put on any players). The danger for Apple is that if DRM-free music proliferates and people choose different music players all Apple is left with is revenue-neutral (or perhaps positive) music store. Apple seems quite confident however it will stay ahead of the pack with its iPod brand and continued good industrial design.
EMI also has something to lose from the move to DRM-free music. EMI are banking (rightly, I suggest that the impact of DRM on piracy will be low. The reason Nicoli gave is that giving users the ability to buy music legitimately and easily takes the wind out of the pirate music scene (the death of movies and music has been foretold in the last from video and cassette tapes).
EMI says this represents:

1. Good value for money
2. choice
3. simple, easy to use

First partner to use this product is iTunes- available in May. 128kbs AAC is best quality available but not as good as original source material. New versions sold alongside and 256kbs AAC. $1.29 (30 cents more than original). Entire EMI catalogue sold worldwide and current songs are upgradeable. Albums are same price in either format. Apple will reach out to other record companies and believes this trend will be followed by others.

DRM-free is good and a step in the right direction and Apple (dare I say it Steve Jobs) has made this more bearable to record companies by tacking on an increased cost to consumers but this does not reflect the costs to the record companies and therefore is hard to support - Why should we pay to get what we already should be getting?
Apple Press Release:

“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice—the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”

“EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favorite artists,” said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group.

Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.