• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 9, 2007

EMI Group is considering allowing online music stores to sell digital downloads of tracks in its catalog in MP3 format, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal.

The news is coming the same week that Apple Computer chief Steve Jobs made headlines by calling on record companies to allow iTunes to sell tracks without the built-in restrictions that limit users' ability to transfer the music to portable players.

Currently, iTunes sells songs that can be transferred to iPods, but no other portable devices -- at least not without a high degree of technical know-how. Such restrictions have landed Apple in court, defending an antitrust lawsuit that accuses the company of trying to create a monopoly by selling music that's compatible with iPods and no other portable players. Jobs maintains that the record labels insisted on such restrictions as a condition of making their catalogs available through iTunes.

It's clear that the file-sharing enabled by Napster in the late 1990s has scarred the record industry. But their solution -- allowing music to be sold on the Internet, but only with built-in limits -- has created all sorts of annoyances for consumers, who find themselves tied to iPods once they've downloaded songs using iTunes.

If the music industry really wants to boost sales, it can sell tracks in the format that consumers want, without the artificial limits that keep people from listening to the music they've purchased.