French service offers DRM-free music
Starzik -- a French digital music service -- is offering musical tracks without DRM copy protection, a restriction imposed by services such as iTunes. Offering 600,000 tracks from three major record labels and thousands of independent labels, the service circumvents platform differences between Microsoft Windows systems and Macs, whose incompatibilities arise from the Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection schemes imposed by digital music distributors to regulate how consumers use the music they purchase online, according to Macworld UK. Starzik's tracks will be offered in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, and WMA formats. Thus far the store only caters to French customers, selling individual tracks for ?1 each and albums for ?9.