EMI Group will soon sell digital music with better sound quality and no digital rights management restrictions through Apple’s iTunes Store.
EMI’s entire digital music catalog will be available in premium DRM-free form via iTunes in May, the music label said Monday at a press conference in London.
Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. Rather, they will complement the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads and will be sold at a premium: $1.29 per song.

Consumers who have already purchased EMI tracks containing Apple’s FairPlay copy protection will be able to upgrade them to the premium version for 30 cents, EMI said. Full albums in DRM-free form can be bought at the same price as standard iTunes albums.

“We are committed to embracing change, and to developing products and services that consumers really want to buy,” said Eric Nicoli, chief executive of EMI. Nicoli cited internal EMI tests in which higher-quality, DRM-free songs outsold its lower-quality, copy-protected counterparts 10-to-1.
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When the Zune first came out I did a review on it, it was a pretty favorable review, with nothing really bad being said about it, and if your interested here is the link. But after a few weeks of owning it and screwing around with it, I started to notice a disturbing trend, it was shutting off on me for no apparent reason out of no where. I even has it shock me through the ear buds once while listening to podcasts at work, wasn’t to thrilled about that. So what I did was I wrote another post about that to see if anyone else noticed a trend like this and this was what I got. But that was the last Zune story that I have wrote and I had a lot of people ask me what has happened with my Zune, so I figured I would write an update on it.So I stuck with my Zune for a couple months because I really wanted it to work but all I was doing was delaying the inevitable, I ended up returning it. It was a several reasons and now I’m going to go into them. First 3*3, the 3 plays 3 days thing is retarded, it really is, if I own the rights to something, ie The XBL Radio Podcast, I should be able to share it as much as I want with the receiver getting to play it for as long or as many times as they want, for MS to put there own drm on my music is a bunch of crap. The fact that I couldn’t share videos was another thing, why does the Zune have Wi-Fi if we can only use it for certain features, the Wi-Fi capabilities was way to locked down. Another Wi-Fi thing that sucked was I couldn’t find anyone else with a Zune to share music with in the first place. Nobody I knew had a Zune except for some MS employees, that was it, everyone I new either had a iPod, Zen or a Sansa.

Another huge issue I had was podcasting, as a podcaster I need to have the ability to download podcasts quickly and easily like with iTunes, and that is so not happening with the Zune. I had to have 2 extra programs running for my podcasts, I used Juice for my audio podcasts, its a pretty good program which allows autotagging and a bunch of other features but it had issues with my video podcasts so then I had used the program called FeedYourZune for my video programs, you can also download audio podcasts with this one but I didn’t like the features on this one too much, plus this was a huge memory hog. So now I have to have 3 programs running at all times for my podcasts to be on my Zune, there was the slow and bulky zune program too. All this to do what iTunes has always done for me.

Now one of my favorite things about the Zune was the large screen, but what good is a large screen if its not being used? iTunes has movie and tv downloads but the Zune, not so much. If you want video on your Zune you have to go elsewhere to get it, not through Microsoft but either though things like video podcasts, direct downloads or by buying video converting programs to get videos on your Zune right. And even then its not always effective. I had many videos that would work on a iPod that the Zune program wouldn’t even put it on my Zune. And while we are talking about buying videos, lets talk about buying other things for the Zune. Lets talk about the Zune marketplace and what a disaster it is. First I friggin hate buying things with MS points, all that does is make you forget that you are wasting real money on downloads, and a perfect example of that is the marketplace for the Xbox 360. Microsoft had a perfectly good music store with there Urge store, they shouldn’t have abandoned that for the Zune, stupid move I thought.

So like I said at the beginning of this post, I returned my Zune. In fact I returned it and I picked up an iPod which I’m very happy with, ya the screen is not as big and it doesn’t have crippled down Wi-Fi, nor fm radio (so far the only thing i really miss), but it does have a brighter screen plus about 12 hour battery life, which is a lot more then the Zune. It had podcast functionality built in to the software and it also allows tv and movie downloading.

There you go, now you all know. And I will not be jumping on the Zune bandwagon again till MS fixes all the things wrong with it and really I won’t even now about it unless they also send me a demo unit because I’m also not spending money on another Zune again. I hope this will help future Zune buyers in swaying there decision as well because I do not want you guys to have to go though what I had to go though.

BTW, do you know that with every Zune sold Universal gets a royalty because they figure that you are stealing music? How crappy is that?

That’s right Nike and Apple have teamed up to get you in motion.So go-ahead and pick your mix and motivate your run. Nike+ lets you listen to tunes while you track your progress on an Ipod nano. Simply slip the Nike+ sensor into the Air Zoom Moire shoe pocket, or any other Nike+ Ready shoe, and head out. The Ipod nano tracks your progress, providing feedback on distance, time, pace and calories burned directly through the headphones. After your run, a performance summary appears on the nano screen and can be heard through the headphones. You also will be able to sync the info up to your pc. Now that’s cool. I have a Timex system that pretty much does the same thing but it also keeps your heart rate, and I paid $300 for the system. With this system you will be able to hit the road for around $130 ($100 for the shoes and $30 for the sport kit that goes into the Ipod). So head over to itunes and download the podrunner podcast (one of my favorite exercise podcast) tie your shoes and hit the road running!

TOG OUT!