2007 will be remembered as the year the recording industry moved away from Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

The latest positive development in this saga is that a few days ago Deutsche Grammophon (which belongs to Universal / Vivendi), mainly known by classical music and opera afficionados, opened its online music store.

The stores offers the entire DG music catalog in mp3 format encoded at 320 kbps. The web site is reasonably well done for a version 1.0. Search appears to function, album tracks list properly, and the previews are of good quality. My main disappointment is that there is no option to download music in a lossless format such as FLAC, but maybe I am expecting too much.

As the web site says, "Over 600 out-of-print CDs are made available again as downloads in this shop." Finally, somebody realizes that in the internet age, nothing should ever get "out-of-print" again.

I wish DG much success with this web site, even though it may be too late for the music industry to be rescued, as "For the last eight years the industry has been doing nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on its own musical Titanic.".