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October 17, 2007

itunes_store

Putting the ‘DRM’ in ‘drama’: iTunes Plus drops to $0.99, but upgrades will cost you

Posted Oct. 17, ’07, 8:15 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iTunes » iTunes Store

Upgrade My LibraryGoodbye DRM, and good riddance. While we haven’t fully evicted your scourge from the face of the digital music industry, we are today one step closer to eradicating your vile blight. Apple this morning officially announced what we were hearing yesterday, that the price of buying a DRM-free track on the iTunes Music Store is now equivalent to the price of buying a protected track: $0.99.

“iTunes Plus has been incredibly popular with our customers and now we’re making it available at an even more affordable price,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We’re adding over two million tracks from key independent labels in addition to EMI’s digital catalog and look forward to even more labels and artists making their music available on iTunes Plus.”
And so, the last few holdouts remain: Warner Bros., whose CEO Edgar Bronfman relented ever so slightly last month; Universal, who is selling DRM-free tracks through other vendors, like Amazon; and Sony BMG, who’s been staying more or less out of the fight.

But not all is happy in DRM-free land. As Apple 2.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt points out, customers who want to upgrade their existing protected tracks to their unprotected equivalents are still being charged the 30% premium. For my part, I logged on to iTunes this morning to find that one of my purchased albums, The Shins’ Wincing the Night Away would cost me $3.00 to upgrade to iTunes Plus, despite the fact that the album and the tracks cost the same when purchased outright, regardless of DRM.

Anyway, with this move, Steve Jobs is about one million tracks away from his stated goal of having half of the iTunes Store’s songs available DRM-free by the end of the year. All he really needs to do is convince one more company to jump on the bandwagon—my money’s on Universal, despite their tiff. Could we see DRM join PVC and BRMs on the trash heap of three letter acronyms by the end of 2008?


2 Comments

fletcher Author Profile Page said:

It doesn't seem unfair to me to charge for the upgrade from protected to unprotected tracks. You are getting another download from Apple at higher quality than what you originally purchased.

However, I look forward to the day when the other labels finally see the light and drop DRM. Then "plus" can become the default and the whole notion of upgrading tracks will be a distant memory.

Does anyone have a good list of what independent labels are now available without DRM?

Also, the SDK for the iPhone has been announced for February!

October 17, 2007 9:50 AM
Shawn Oster said:

I have to disagree with fletcher above, it's absoluely wrong of Apple to charge an "upgrade" free.

As I see it we should have been given higher quality, DRM-free tracks to begin with instead of low-quality "FairPlay" tracks and Apple in a show of consumer respect should upgrade everyone for free.

If Jobs vision really is a DRM-free world then he needs to man up and automatically upgrade everyone for free.

October 17, 2007 11:00 PM

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