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iTunes to drop DRM
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 7th January 2009
Fans of iTunes will be pleased to hear that songs will be DRM free in future, but dismayed at the 30¢ per song charge for freeing already-purchased content.
According to The Guardian, the company announced the move yesterday at the MacWorld conference. The move comes after Apple was able to secure a new agreement with the major record labels, including the right to set variable prices rather than a fixed per-song fee – something rivals such as Amazon's MP3 Store have been offering since the beginning.
Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing at Apple, said that he hopes “by the end of the quarter all 10 million songs will be DRM free in iTunes and iTunes plus.”
With the removal of copy protection from the song library, the store immediately becomes more useful for anyone who doesn't own an iPod; tracks without DRM can be burned to CD or converted into different formats without the restrictions or loss of quality previously enforced by iTunes. Whether the move will be enough to tempt people away from the competing services offered by online retailers such as Amazon or Play – who already offer songs in the DRM-free and cross-platform MP3 format, often at prices cheaper than the 79p charged by iTunes – remains to be seen.
There's good news and bad news for anyone who has already built up an extensive library of purchased iTunes content: the good news is that Apple will be providing functionality to convert locked-down content to DRM-free versions; the bad news is that, according to CNet, a fee of 30¢ will be charged per song in addition to the money already paid for the purchase. For users who have a large collection, this could soon add up to a significant sum.
Pleased to see restrictive DRM dealt another deathblow in the marketplace, or is iTunes a poor option for anyone who doesn't own an iPod anyway? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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they also want me to download the new firm ware for my ipod touch at the price of 5$ man apple are turning more and more into microtwats everyday.
But you can already burn them to CD?
You can, of course, burn to a CD and then rip back to the hard drive - bypassing the DRM - but the quality loss remains.
Personally, I'm not interested in online music stores until they sell loseless quality tracks. Plus, 95% of music in them is just mainstream sewage so they are usless anyway. And I hate iTunes. And I will never let Apple earn a cent on me. And the list goes on :)
Magnatune is good tho. They have ogg, wav and flac, lots of good music (not mainstream, thankfully), no DRM, no ads all over, just a clean, good, fast and stable service. Every time i visit them I spend way too much.
To have the music in the car as well as at home.
Does itunes even use mp3 anymore? haven't they moved on to better quality yet?
30 cent to unlock your allready purchased music? have they gone completly mad?:(
To take issue with your "better quality" comment, while newer standards such as AAC and OGG Vorbis can offer improved encoding efficiency (better quality at the same file size or equal quality in a smaller file size) than MP3, it is widely accepted among audiophiles that the best implementations of the MP3 standard (lame v3.98) with suitable settings (-v2 or better) can produce results which are almost always perceptually transparent (indistinguishable from the original in a blind test) to the vast majority of listeners even using very high quality hi-fi equipment. See http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lame for more info.
I wasn't aware there was a quality drop. Shows how often I burn CD's with iTunes!
I expect it's because they are 'performing' a service to you by enabling you to use the media in a different way - not entirely different, of course, but still different.
Aren't they also introducing a lower price tier?
As for quality - I'd like everything in FLAC, but since iTunes/iPods don't support that, well. Mp3 is my choice for media format, as it's more than likely to be supported by everything and everything else. Things like AAC and OGG are not always supported.
Maybe now I might....if it weren't for the fact that they don't really offer anything that would be of interest or unnattainable the traditional way...and...
Old users needing to pay to convert your already purchased songs with DRM to ones without DRM is a sad sad move, as I see it as ripping off (pun) already paying customers. Way to show your appreciation Apple.
Getting rid of DRM is a good move, but this is hardly doing it well an respectfully. I guess they like peeing in their own pool no matter what.
way too expensive PC's, Laptops, music players.... etc
charge for every nitpicking software upgrade
yada yada.. its too bad linux hasn't really taken off, but a windows based PC is still way superior to a mac in usability.
I have a small Itunes collection... I started using the service to be a legit music purchaser... then I learned my lesson with the Ipod, the downgrade in music quality for CD burns. I REFUSED to pay $100 for a Ipod cable for my pickup's (great) stereo...
There is no way I will pay .30 to free my music from their grips.. I'll find other *less legal* ways to do it..
I hope Apple dies... :D
Hmm, just an idea, but what if you would stream it to another pc via lan and then rip the stream? it might just be crazy enough to work, technically you woudnt even be doing anything illegal as you bought the music and woudnt be sharing it with anyone else.
i may look at itunes, but i still reckon it wont have what i want.
I'll stick with the sites I always use:
audiojelly.com
djdownload.com
trackitdown.net
beatport.com