DRM free music from EMI on the iTunes store

After lots of hunting on the internet, I found press release and webcast (downloadable) about today's Apple and EMi announcement of DRM free and higher quality tracks from EMI on the iTunes store. Sounds like a pretty major announcement to me and I hope to read more on Apple's site soon (so far there's no mention I can see).

Seems the higher quality, DRM free tracks also cost more money - not so good.

"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." Apple's US press release.

”We are going to give iTunes customers a choice — the current versions of our songs for the same 79 pence price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 20 pence 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.” UK press release.

I noticed that DRM free full albums are the same price as the DRMd, lower bitrate ones - nice. MacBreak Weekly has a special with John Gruber on iTunes + EMI - DRM and a video interview from BBC.