MUMBAI: Universal UK has launched a DRM free website which would provide its users with rare and obscure music, reports The Industry Standard.

Titled as Lost Tunes, the website will contain music from classic rock and pop titles, and the digital store will also features archived reggae, blues, soul and spoken word catalogues.

Users can download single tracks from the website at 99p while, the cost of different albums would differ from one another. The song files are sold without DRM protections and can be freely copied to CD or a portable media player. The service has launched with 134 albums which are available exclusively through Lost Tunes.

The DRM technology allows users to store songs in multiple devices which make piracy easy.

Analyst Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research has been reported as saying that this was another nail in the coffin of DRM.

"This sort of niche targeting makes a lot of sense. But every time another label makes more catalogue available DRM-free you wonder just how long we can continue to have any premium a la carte downloads sold with DRM," said Mulligan.

"The major record labels cannot continue to treat DRM-free as a tactical experiment and must recognize it as the strategic necessity it really is," Mulligan continued.

By the end of this year 600 albums will be added to the site. According to universal, at least 100 of these has never been available legally in digital format.