EMI Music - one of the world's leading global music companies, Google and YouTube, the leader in online video - today announced a landmark agreement which will give YouTube users unprecedented access to authorized videos and recordings from EMI Music artists, including those featured in user generated content.

"With this deal, all four of the world's major music companies are now official YouTube partners," said Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube. "EMI is a proven leader in the emerging digital music landscape and one of the world's largest and most respected music companies. We're excited to add EMI Music's stellar roster of artists' content to our site and make it available to our community."

If you judge by the title of this story alone, you might think that the European Commission (EU) is punishing Apple and EMI for getting ready to offer music sans DRM's (Digital Right Management). The EU's complaint is much simpler than that. Apparently, Apple would only be applying these costs in some parts of the iTunes store. So, a song can cost less in one European country than another. This violates a very important article of the EU, and so Apple may incur a 10% fine if they do not change things soon.

For those of you curious about the shenanigans going on between EMI and Apple: The two companies have proudly announced a strategic partnership, and EMI will be sending Apple all their music without DRMs, which is a bold move. It is risky from a business standpoint, but very welcomed from a customer standpoint. Proof that EMI will be pioneering DRM free music can be found here in their press release.

Digital Rights Management is famous for frustrating numerous people that chose to download music legally when it comes to sharing between devices, whilst the illegal file sharers sit there laughing at them. But now it seems one of the major record labels, EMI, could be listening to customers at last. Rumours are flying around the internet claiming that Steve Jobs' visit to London to speak with EMI could be to negotiate a deal that will see significant amounts of EMI's music catalogue being available to download on iTunes without anti-piracy software, something music fans have been begging for since the start of the legal music downloads. If this is true, then it might not take long for the other major record labels to respond with DRM-free music, a move which would make it much easier for music downloaders to play their music on different MP3 players. There will be a live audio webcast of the press conference at 1pm London time on EMI's website, which is when the deal is supposed to be announced.



Update: it's official, EMI has launched DRM-free downloads across its entire music catalogue (although iTunes will get it first) - read on for the press release.

It seems like the music industry really is turning away from the highly-criticized DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology. EMI, a record label, has been asking companies for offers of all their music. And this time, instead of offering it as a DRM-infested WMA, EMI is offering it as an unaltered MP3 file. There will be more details if music distributors such as iTunes, Yahoo Music, and Urge decide to buy these clean MP3 files.