According to a report from Business Week, the music giant Sony BMG will sell DRM free music some time in the first quarter.

If the Business Week report will prove to be true, Sony BMG will be the latest music company to join the DRM-Free movement initiated last year in April by EMI.

EMI announcement has followed an open letter wrote by Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, who said that iTunes was born with the DRM stigma because the music companies wanted to drive customers away from piracy. Apparently they failed.

Since the tunes will be stripped off their DRM software, they will be compatible wit almost any MP3-player and music-phone sold out there, including of course the iPod.

Quoting unnamed sources, Business Week announced that Sony BMG’s plans will be announced in the coming weeks after the SuperBowl promotion announced by Pepsi and Amazon will kick off on February 3.

Last month Pepsi announced that starting with Super Bowl Sunday, it will allow customers to download one free MP3 track after collection five song codes from soda bottles’ caps. The company said the promotion will include up to 5 billion bottles and that customers would have to visit a specific redemption store on Amazon’s web site.

The last SuperBowl promotion from Pepsi had taken place four years ago, when the company has joined its forces with Apple’s iTunes. Sony has been experimenting with DRM-free songs for about six months and as the studies have revealed that a growing number of music fans are downloading their favorite songs rather than buying CDs, the music companies are forced to find new channels to promote and sell their music.

Last month after Christmas Amazon announced that it would begin offering downloads from Warner Music Group Corp.'s song catalog. Universal Music Group joined EMI in the DRM-free revolution in August.

Also, Sony BMG’s move follows after in August last year, Sony has unplugged its proprietary format for music files, ATRAC, during their press event at IFA 2007 in Berlin.

ATRAC (the sort for Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) standard was adopted by Sony in 1992 for MiniDisc and the latest version, ATRAC Advanced Lossless was introduced in 2006. Sony claimed that ATRAC Advanced Lossless can provide compression for a CD music source at approximately 30-80% that of the original size without any quality loss.

Still ATRAC standard failed to become popular despite Sony’s efforts and it was considered as the main reason behind poor Walkman sales.

Also during the same event in Berlin it was announced that by March 2008 Sony will close its Connect music store, which was launched in 2004 as a response to iTunes Music Store.

As some analysts noted it’s unclear if Sony BMG’s catalog of DRM-Free tracks will be available on iTunes or Amazon. Currently Amazon's "MP3 Store" is one of the biggest collection of DRM-free music on the Web, with over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists.

Also, it’s very possible that Sony BMG will open it own music store or it will sign a distribution deal a social networking site as other music companies have done in the past. With Sony BMG dropping the DRM the pressure on iTunes is increasing, and there were rumors that Universal Music is trying to take on iTunes with a new music service.

In October, BusinessWeek reported that Universal chief Doug Morris is enlisting other big music players for an online service, called Total Music. Among those mentioned is heavyweight Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, another potential partner.