MP3 players will have a boost in sales now as big music labels are slowly getting to see the consumer’s viewpoint and are warming up to letting users downloads music files into mp3 format!

While mp3 format was a pain in the side of major record labels for years now they are looking into cashing in on this.  EMusic, for example, offers 1.5 million songs that are all encoded in MP3 format that include no digital rights management (DRM) technology.

More record labels are beginning to test consumer interest in legal MP3 downloads. Yahoo Music ran several promotions that offered MP3-encoded songs from several artists, with approval from record labels.

EMI has officially declined to comment if the company will test the MP3 market in 2007, but analysts believe the record company has something up its sleeve. The MP3 format became popular in the late 1990s because it offered a way of compressing sound files so that they retained a large degree of their quality while making them much easier to store or transmit online.