As part of its Macworld announcements, Apple today announced that all of its music will soon be available in the iTunes Plus format, Apple's, DRM-free format that includes 256Kbps AAC encoding. In April, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three prices: $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29, based on what the music labels charge Apple.
For those of us who bought a ton of music at $0.99 with the DRM attached will be able to "upgrade" to the new format, for either $0.30 extra per song, or 30% of the album price. Approximately 8 million of its songs are now available in the DRM-free format, with the remaining 2 million songs available by the end of March. However, apparently you can't upgrade to the new format on a per-song basis, it might be an "all-or-nothing" affair (I haven't checked personally yet, but I'm reading other blog posts / comments to that effect).
Another question I'd have is whether upgrading the song to the new DRM-free version will overwrite the existing song, or whether I'm going to need some additional storage space for a second song file (one that has DRM, one that doesn't). If that's the case, the beneficiaries of this announcement will be companies like Seagate, Western Digital and other storage vendors.
On the plus side, users with multiple PCs who want to play all of their music, or those with portable devices that want to hear their iTunes-purchased music won't have to worry so much about the "five computers only" rule – if you upgrade, at least that feature will be gone, right?
Deciding whether I should upgrade to the DRM-free versions is going to be tough, since it will affect my wallet. I've downloaded at least 200 songs via the original DRM-laden iTunes songs, and my wife has downloaded even more. Other colleagues have switched to services like Amazon.com or Walmart.com for their music purchases (which are DRM-free, and even less expensive), and on occasions I've bought some songs there. But the majority has still been with Apple. It kind of stinks that as a loyal user of their service, I still need to pay to unlock my songs rather than offering me a free upgrade (or even let me pick and choose which songs to unlock). I'm sure Apple would argue that the upgrade costs go to the music label for the "higher quality" 256Kbps format, but I've never cared about the audio quality as much as I've just wanted to be able to listen to the songs on whatever device I've had at the time.
What do you think of this announcement? If you've been buying iTunes songs with the DRM, are you going to upgrade? Switch to another offering? Let me know.
Advertisement: |
Network World's product test editor and one cool dude.
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Post new comment