In a remarkable about face for a major record company, EMI Music will be offering their entire catalog on iTunes at superior bit rates and DRM-free. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the progress of music in the digital frontier, you can recognize how much of a landslide this is. For the past years we’ve seen the record companies take an aggressive, brutalizing stance towards consumers, whether it’s prosecuting college students for amassing enormous illegal music libraries, installing spyware-like software on CDs that prevents you from ripping multiple copies of them, or the hated DRM which makes it difficult to share files one downloads off iTunes. All these restrictions have made it much more tempting for the average consumer to simply download music illegally, and certainly hasn’t garnered any warm and fuzzy feelings for the companies. While we can certainly respect major companies’ battle to maintain relevance in a radically new world, they would be much better suited to embrace the digital age and to monetize music differently. And here, maybe, is the first step to that new model. Well done, EMI — we certainly look forward to a more functional download.