Today Apple and EMI, in a surprise press conference in London, announced that starting in May, consumers can purchase any music that EMI currently sells from their "digital catalog" without Digital Rights Management restrictions.

This announcement means that you'll be able to copy and listen to the EMI music (including artists such as Coldplay and Norah Jones) you paid for anywhere you want. Two significant notes:

1) The music will sound better. This is not because DRM sounds bad, but because they decided to encode the unprotected songs at a higher-quality setting, presumably to justify:

2) The tracks will be more expensive. At $1.29 a pop, they'll be 30 cents more than before.

Hopefully the other major labels will follow suit, and we can end the DRM nightmare once and for all.

(The EMI "digital catalog" part is probably a reference to the fact that there's still no way to buy tracks from The Beatles online, despite widespread rumor mongering to the contrary).

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store [Apple]