Well it seems that Steve Jobs meant business after his press release a few months ago regarding his negative feelings towards DRM.

Today, Apple and EMI entered into agreements allowing people to download DRM-free music with a doubled sound quality for a premium and music videos with no added cost on Apple’s iTunes Store. Costing thirty cents more than iTunes’ normal offering of 99 cents-a-song, users now really own their music; DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management, is technology embedded in media that lets content providers restrict uses of it. For iTunes songs, this means that users previously could only listen to their songs on five computers, and burn their songs onto CD a maximum of 7 times. With this landmark deal, users are now free to do as they please with their media.

Steve Jobs seems to have a bright future in mind for DRM-free media on iTunes. When asked about his projection of 2.5 million unrestricted songs on iTunes by year’s end, said Jobs, “Yes… that is our projection for other labels coming on board as well.”

Addendum: Typed in haste, I forgot to mention in this post that users who’ve downloaded music from EMI artists in the past may convert these purchases to DRM-free, higher quality versions for 30 cents extra. It’d be nice if they didn’t charge a fee, but oh well, I’m more than happy to be able to have DRM-free iTunes content at all!