Don’t want to read the entire tedious liveblog of the EMI/Apple press event this morning? I don’t blame you. To make it easy, we’ll simmer it down into a delicious soup of relevant information. Here’s what you need to know about DRM-free music on iTunes.
There will be two products available: a premium and a standard, to use EMI CEO Eric Nicoli’s terminology. The standard is exactly what you’re used to today: DRM-protected music available for $0.99 (or similar price points around the world), encoded in AAC format at 128kbps.
The premium product is a little different. These tracks will be free of DRM, and they will be encoded at 256kbps (also in the AAC format). The price will be slightly more expensive: $1.29 per track. However, albums are being made available to retailers by EMI at the same price.
Finally, if you own existing EMI tracks purchased from the iTunes Store, you’ll be able to upgrade them to the new premium tracks by paying the difference, or $.29 per song. No word on whether you’ll be able to upgrade albums for a lower price.
EMI music videos will also be made available in DRM-free format, though nothing was said about what format they’d be available in (presumably unprotected H.264). EMI will be making its whole catalog available, and Apple expects other companies to jump on this bandwagon; they estimate that half of iTunes 5 million track catalog will be available DRM-free by the end of the year. The DRM-free EMI tracks will be available worldwide in May.
Two questions. Can high quality albums be purchased from the iTunes Store for the same 9.99, and will there be an upgrade of the quality (or cost) of the music videos?
" All EMI music videos will also be available on the iTunes Store DRM-free with no change in price.
EMI is introducing a new wholesale price for premium single track downloads, while maintaining the existing wholesale price for complete album"
From the press release: http://www.emigroup.com/Press/2007/press18.htm
$.30/track to upgrade, $1.29 - $.99 = $.3
If they charge only $.29, it would be cheaper to buy the lower-quality DRMed track and upgrade. That wouldn't be so good for Apple's bandwidth.
What about other players. Don't they play only mp3 format? Will you have to buy a new player or ipod?
@Flynn: That's up to those players. AAC is open format, part of the MPEG4 standard, so other companies can choose to implement it if they want; I'm guessing they'll do that in a hurry. :) As for older players that only support MP3, you can transcode from AAC to MP3 via iTunes. You may lose some quality, but 256kbps gives you a lot to work with.
@definetheline: Yup, high quality albums will cost the same as DRM-encoded albums. Sounds like EMI is trying to push album sales. They're not dead after all. ;)
AAC is the high quality MPEG 4 audio format, the successor to good old MP3 which is MPEG 1 audio.
Much better quality and an open format free of the license costs and litigation of the MP3 format.
This will be another nail in the coffin of Microsoft's proprietary WMA format.
-Mart
I'm glad I don't have that 6th sense to determine the difference between 128 and 256. I'll continue to buy all my music for 99 cents per song since I have no bones to pick about Apple's DRM. I have friends that do because they can't get copies of songs I bought. ;-) Well, I could give it to them, but why bother? At the beginning of every month I post all the songs I've bought on iTunes the previosu month. I'll be posting March this evening.
Given the fact that DRM and DRM-free albums will both cost $9.99, I wonder how (if) Apple will credit the $1.29 purchases if someone chooses the "complete the album" option. I'm assuming all album downloads will be DRM-free, so does it become a function of the money spent already? Will the purchase of the album completion automatically upgrade any .99 cent purchases to 1.29 DRM-free songs?
Double the data rate doubles the disk space. Apple will be able to sell more iPods to store the music - not a bad deal for Apple at all.