Napster Ditches Protection
Those frustrated with digging around for an MP3 player or portable device that can play protected tracks can breathe a sigh of relief following an announcement from Napster that its catalogue will no longer feature DRM protection.
It’s a long overdue move for an industry that has been plagued with law-suits and court-battles in an attempt to stem the tide of worldwide illegal downloads and recoup flagging sales.
Though it seems blatantly obvious to the rest of us that reasonably priced, reusable music that doesn’t shove DRM down your throat is clearly the way forwards, it’s certainly been slow in arriving.
All tracks on the site have now been encoded to happy-friendly MP3 format, with major music labels such as Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal all signed up.
256Kbps tracks will cost 99c (about 50p) each, with full album downloads starting at about $10.
Napster’s six-million plus song catalogue now makes it the world’s largest collection of MP3s. – Paul Lester
[USAToday]
Original post by nafiz