After EMI, UMG and WMG now Sony BMG goes for DRM-free songs

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sony's music venture with Bertelsmann AG, will start selling some of its music without digital rights management (DRM) through Amazon.com's digital music store, according to a new report from BusinessWeek.com.

Sony BMG’s decision to abandon the practice of attaching customary copy protection software in its music makes it the last of the Big Four record labels to eliminate digital rights management schemes designed to restrict the distribution of music via peer-to-peer networks.

The move follows the New York-based recorded music company, Warner Music Group’s decision to retail its music without Digital Rights Management, or DRM, on the online heavyweight Amazon.com Inc.’s digital music store Amazon MP3.

In August, Universal Music Group had announced its plans to make many of its songs available without copy protection. Owned by French media giant Vivendi, Universal Music Group or UMG said it will sell DRM-free (without digital rights management) digital tracks as a nationwide test to assess the market.

British music giant EMI Music is the other recording label that is selling much of its music without anti-copying software. On April, 2, the London-based music label has announced that it would start selling unprotected content.

Sony BMG has plans to participate in a big Super Bowl event with Pepsi and Amazon that will kick off Feb. 3 and offer free distribution of 1 billion songs from major labels, including Sony BMG, through Amazon's DRM-free download service, BW reported, citing an anonymous source.

The big four music labels’ decision to retail DRM-free music outside of iTunes may pose challenge to Apple Inc., which currently controls major part of the recording industry.

In September, Amazon entered the domain of Apple in online music store by launching its own online music store Amazon MP3 that currently provides DRM-free downloads of over 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels.

By releasing its new DRM-free music download service with an initial catalog of 2.9 million songs in MP3 format, the internet mogul Amazon apparently has become an ally and a potential rival to Apple’s iTunes Store that currently contains more than 6 million songs.

According to Amazon, the songs are encoded in 256 kilobit per second VBR MP3 format and are entirely free of anti-piracy software that make them playable on any handheld music player, including the iPhone and iPods, along with Macs, PCs, and music players from other manufacturers.

However, most of the songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Store are encoded in the AAC format that can only be played on the iPod.

In addition, individual tracks on Amazon’s new service are cheaper than iTunes. Amazon has priced most of Amazon MP3's songs between $0.89 and $0.99. More than half songs of the catalogue are priced at $0.89, a full $0.40 less than iTunes Plus songs, Amazon claims. The company has also guaranteed at the time of store’s launch that its top 100 best sellers will remain at 89 cents.

In Amazon MP3 store sells most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99, again a bit cheaper than albums in the iTunes Store, which has been selling digital albums at $9.99 apiece.