Microsoft’s Zune system will eventually get DRM-free music, according to Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp, but the company has no time frame for offering songs without copy-protection.

In February of this year, Reindorp called Steve Jobs’ push for the music industry to drop DRM ‚Äúirresponsible, or at the very least na√Øve.‚Äù

“It’s like he’s on top of the mountain making pronouncements,” said Reindorp, “while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen.”

On Monday of this week, EMI and Apple announced that most of EMI’s catalog of music would soon be available DRM-free through the iTunes store at a premium of 30 cents per song. As a result, Microsoft is in the position of trying to sell new DRM formats when the latest thing in digital music is DRM-free downloads.

“We’ve been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content,” said Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp. Reindorp said he did not have a time frame for when unprotected songs will be added to the store.

“This does open things up a little bit,” Reindorp said. “It potentially makes the competition more on a device-to-device or service-to-service basis. It will force the various services to really innovate.”

via CNET