iTunes ditches DRM but at what cost?

newsguy 0 Tallied Votes 299 Views Share

It has been a long time coming, but Apple has finally announced that iTunes is going DRM-free. As in, all songs on the iTunes site will ditch DRM. That's everything from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI along with thousands of indie labels. All with their musical offerings now available in the iTunes Plus DRM-free format.

According to Apple the iTunes Store will begin offering eight million songs in the DRM-free format immediately, with the remaining two million songs offered in iTunes Plus by the end of March.

But at what cost? Apple might have ditched DRM, but it has also ditched flat-rate pricing which means you could end up paying less, or more, for your tracks come April when the new pricing structure is introduced.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirms this, telling us "in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points — 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 — with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29." This despite earlier claims that Apple would rather close iTunes than charge higher prices.

If you want your existing library of previously purchased iTunes songs upgraded to DRM-free status complete with higher quality encoding, no problem. Apple says that this is a simple one-click process. It also says it will 'only' charge you 30 cents per song, or 30 percent of the album price if you purchased them as an entire album. Gee, thanks for being so kind Apple. Not. But then things are never easy for the DRM-free fan.

Also new is the ability for iTunes customers to download their songs directly onto their Apple Console Experience or iPhone 3G as the rest of us call it, over the mobile network, for the same price as downloading to their computer. Songs purchased on an iPhone will automatically sync to a user’s computer the next time they sync their iPhone.

John A 1,896 Vampirical Lurker Team Colleague

Great, they've finally gotten around to doubling the bitrate on those AACs. 256 kb/s is acceptable, 128 kb/s was just a joke. Sadly, no sign of them offering lossless music, even though iTunes and their iPods are perfectly capable of playing files encoded to Apple Lossless. Not only would Apple Lossless provide substantially higher music quality, it would pave the way to allowing people to use iTunes music on other MP3 players (transcoding from a lossless source like ALAC to MP3 is acceptable, transcoding from lossy to lossy, i.e. AAC to MP3, however, is not).

So... now that iTunes has ditched DRM, why don't they switch to a more universal format? Cater to the audiophile crowd and offer FLACs, or place themselves in other music player markets by selling plain ol' MP3s.

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