Is the wall coming down?

Great post here by John Gruber about the announcement by EMI that, beginning in May, they'll be selling DRM-free versions of their licensed music on iTunes.

$1.29 USD for drm-free music with twice the encoding quality. And full albums stay the same price. And iTunes offers upgrades of existing purchased music.

The cracks in the wall really started back in February when Jobs wrote his (maligned in some corners) position paper on DRM and posted it to the Apple website. There were lots of people (Cory Doctorow chief among them) who questioned Jobs' sincerity in that move-- surely this was just another way for apple to increase it's monopoly.

So much for that conspiracy theory. Doctorow doesn't seem to understand that if you make things easy and high-quality, people are willing to pay for that-- not everyone, but a large-enough segment of the population to run a thriving business on. Leave the pirates be-- as Jobs pointed out, for every DRM scheme, there will be a 12-year-old kid who can break it in under 30 minutes. But making music cheap and easily available and easily manageable, once purchased-- not limiting the number of times you can burn your own music to CD, or laborious 'authorization' processes for your different devices-- wipe away all of that and let people pay for their music, and then leave them alone... the services that allow this to happen will be the big winners... Hopefully, Apple continues on this course.