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Music company EMI Group PLC -- home of The Rolling Stones and Coldplay -- has been talking with online retailers about possibly selling its entire digital music catalog in MP3 format without copy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing numerous people familiar with the matter.

The MP3 format, which can be freely copied and played on virtually any device, would allow consumers to play music purchased from any online store on any digital music device.

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This is very good news indeed. One of the main reasons that I've never bought music online, is that they have either been in crappy .wma format OR in .m4a from the iTunes store which doesn't work on anything other than an iPod which is just silly.

That said, I'd still buy the CD's of artists I wish to support, just because it's so much nicer to have it there on your shelf, and the super-duper quality is there.

If they decided to sell the mp3's at 320kbps, or in the flac format however...

i've never paid to download music, and I never will unless they stop producing music on a tangible format or I specifically want something that's being made available as download-only

Aren't apple heading towards DRM free with iTunes as well?

[have moved to latest news - hope that ok?]

There's talk about it, but i bet they'll still sell the moosic in m4a format, which is pretty much useless to anyone who doesn't own an iPod.

I buy music from itunes, got a winamp plugin to play it as itunes is a resource hog!

But yeah, this is better news as only being able to play music you've bought on a devide you don't own sux, and so does the wma format!