Apple To Grant All Labels DRM-Free Distribution

SexCaptain writes "MacRumors.com reveals a letter circulated by Apple to all producers of content for the iTunes Store, announcing that from May onward they can sell their music at higher quality and free of DRM. Hopefully this opens the doors for labels like Netwerk. This is a big step in the right direction, although it's unclear exactly what Apple means by 'higher quality,' and there is no mention of price changes. (Apple charges $0.30 more per song for DRM-free content from EMI and encodes it at 256K.) Quoting from the letter: 'Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free," Apple wrote in the communication. "Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."

Comments

Re:Why Pay more?

[Kenshin]

The price of DRM-free albums remains unchanged. It's only DRM-free singles that go up in price to $1.29.

Re:Competition for emusic

[onepower]

The album price is the same for DRM free, higher quality... $9.99 for most albums. That makes the convenience and lack of censorship worth every penny. It isn't like you can buy a single DRM free track from Walmart either.

Re:What we reallly want...

[fangorious]

what Apple wants is their AAC to become the defacto standard over mp3.

AAC isn't Apple's codec. It's the MPEG group's replacement for MP3.

Top 40???

[fyngyrz]

but for all those people looking for DRM-free top-40-type music, dream come true, eh?

Mmm, no. Not just top 40. Apple carries all manner of classic rock, hard rock, symphonic, blues, and more. beat them up for DRM (OS or other) all you like, but let's not just lie about things, ok?

Re:Whoopty-do. AAC itself is proprietary and locke

[UnknowingFool]

This announcement doesn't mean much at all. AAC is still a proprietary format that only exists in Apple's reality sphere, and outside of iPods and Macs, doesn't have much reason to exist at all other than to have yet another standard out there. AAC is a format only used by two types of people: iTunes customers who have no choice, and the rabid Mac fanatics who will happily jump to a locked, patent encumbered protocol because Apple approves it.

When Apple comes to the table with something industry standard like MP3, OGG, FLAC, uncompressed WAV, or even (gasp!) WMA, then this will be a newsmaking event. Otherwise, its just the same old stuff. People's music is still locked down in a non-standard format nobody would even go near if it wasn't Apple's baby.

You are either a uninformed troll or an MS shill but again for the record: AAC is a part of the MPEG standard that is used by many other players like Sony's PS3, MS Zune, SanDisk Sansa e200R, numerous cell phones, etc. The licensing scheme of AAC is even more generous than MP3 as there is no license on distributed content. Also for the record, WMA has never been the industry standard. It was a standard foisted up us by MS which actually suffers from the same defects that you claim about AAC. If you change AAC in your ranting with WMA and Apple with MS, your statements would actually be true.

Re:Is Apple going to extend that grant?

[travail_jgd]

I agree with your point, but not your rationale.

I'm *gasp* 35, and for as long as I can remember music has been freely copyable. Radios with built-in cassette players could often record "free" [1] music directly from the radio, without any external microphone. One radio station even spent Sunday nights playing entire sides of LPs.

The CD era made it even easier to make high quality tapes. It was easy to record, and in some cases the quality was better than a mastered cassette. Some of the "portable systems" [2] could actually calculate optimal song orders to put as many tracks on a tape as possible.

My point is that at least two generations have grown up with the ideas of "free music" and "freely copying music". Right or wrong, it's a part of the American culture. The sudden appearance of DRM when freely copied/format shifted music has been permitted for decades is a culture shock, and is only turning people away from the big labels.

1: Sure, someone was paying for it, but to the end user the only costs were electricity and cassettes.
2: aka boom boxes. I'm a child of the 80's.