Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

In a suprise announcement, today at 1pm London time (GMT, 2pm CET), EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs will hold a forty minute press conference. Although no information about the press conference has been made public (other than “to hear about an exciting new digital offering.”), analysts believe that this may be an announcement about EMI ending its DRM for the iTunes Store. It is no secret that Steve Jobs is opposed to DRM, as was made public by him in a statement earlier this year. EMI is the third largest music label after Universal and Sony.

Rumour has it that The Wall Street Journal has the scoop: The WSJ reports that the two are set to announce that a significant portion of EMI’s catalog will be sold online without any DRM. That would really be a breakthrough as most users hate DRM because it ties them hand and feet to either a specific platform or medium. The fact that their music now might be free of DRM might boost online sales for Apple's iTunes Store even more.

UPDATE:
The cat is out of the bag: EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the two companies are officially offering EMI’s digital catalog DRM-free on iTunes; however this comes at a price. As to be expected the record company was not going to 'sell out' their rights completely and it seems that they came up with a compromise:

EMI will offer all songs from its digital catalog without DRM but they will be sold at $1.29 per song, $0.30 more per song than the current price. In return for this songs will be encoded at 256kbps AAC (current is 128kbps). Entire album purchases will stay at the same price, but have the higher audio quality and will be DRM free.

EMI music videos will be available DRM free with no change in price. Customers who purchased tracks previously can upgrade to DRM free tracks for $0.30 per track.

Jobs says they are trying to do similar deals with other labels, and expects that 50% of all of their tracks sold will be DRM free by end of year.

So there you have it: not exactly the end of DRM but a clever compromise. According to sources Apple is trying to make similar deals with the other big labels. Apple CEO Steve Jobs even expects that by the end of 2007 50% of all of their tracks sold, will be DRM free.

See the official pressrelease.