Man Plus Machine

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, recently announced that it will not renew its contract with Apple over iTunes. Instead it will make music available to Apple at will. What this means isn’t totally clear to me and it’s not sure whether this means that UMG will pull any artists from  iTunes. It does mean, however, that UMG can pull artists on a relatively short notice, should UMG and Apple not agree on pricing and such.

I must say this is a surprising move to me since EMI and Apple announced their collaboration on DRM free music a few months ago. I expected other music companies to follow suit and now this happens. In my opinion it’s not a massive loss, however. Apple and iTunes are going  strong and with iTunes being the third biggest music vendor in North America, UMG can’t ignore it completely.