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

Competition for emusic

[vakuona]

This could get really interesting. Of course emusic uses the more ubiquitous mp3, bt I bet eveyr 'mp3' player will now come playing unprotected aac as standard now Apple is making things interesting.

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:Competition for emusic

[StikyPad]

calling it progress to pay extra for the lack of something is quite bizarre.

Not when you can have soup for $1, or bodily-fluid free soup for $5.

Re:Competition for emusic

[plover]

The cost of downloaded music by all logic should be below the half of what the CD of the same stuff costs.

You are only looking at a fraction of the actual costs. How do you know what Apple's costs are, vs. the costs incurred by a physical distribution company? The costs are not just for the physical media and distribution, or the network bandwidth, iTMS development and hosting costs, but also the negotiated per-title royalties that must be paid. The labels get their cut, and that's probably the most expensive component of the price.

And even after all that, sure, Apple's costs may be lower. But Apple's prices are apparently higher by your measure, and I think that's why you're complaining.

You see, there's this funny idea called 'Capitalism'. Capitalism pretty much means "if you want to sell a product at whatever price you want to sell it, go for it. If you make money, congratulations. If you lose money, tough." The corollary to that is "if you want something and are willing to pay the asked-for price, you can buy it. If you are unwilling to pay that price, you can try to negotiate a new lower price, shop elsewhere, or go without."

So if you think a DRM-free song is worth only $0.25, why not write to Apple and ask them to sell you that song for $0.25? If they're unwilling to negotiate with you, then you are free to go to another source and pay their asking price. Otherwise, contact the record labels yourself and start a music distribution business of your own, set your prices at $0.25, and make lots of money. Let us know how that works out for you.

ITunes Producer now uses Apple Lossless

[Anonymous Coward]

They used to like 128kbps AAC uploaded to them, but now they want lossless - so it's been on the cards for a while (not the DRM free, but higher quality). Anyway, means they can encode to anything they want for all the new stuff without having to transcode. Hasn't helped with their congested servers though.

Apropo of nothing I suppose, but thought it might be interesting.

Wait a minute

[Richard McBeef]

How am I supposed to manage my digital rights now?

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.

This sucks

[catbutt]

When Jobs came out with his "Thoughts on Music", I made all kinds of cynical comments saying that he was being disingenious for this or that reason. After all, Job's in incredibly successful and people all over the world laud him and his company's products, so he NEEDS to be brought down a notch.

Well now he's making me look like an ass.

Jobs and Apple are still EVIL

[Infonaut]

To sum up the list of objections to this move by Apple:

• Apple is still not offering something for nothing, which pisses me off.
• This is just a big PR stunt. Apple isn't really doing this for the right reasons, so it's still wrong.
• This should have been done a long time ago, so the fact that they're doing it now makes it evil.
• Apple is just trying to make their EVIL, proprietary AAC (Apple Audio Compression) dominate the free, open, wonderful MP3 format!
• I don't like iTunes, therefore this move toward the elimination of DRM in music doesn't help me. This is Apple's fault. They're evil.
• Steve Jobs wears sweaters. I hate sweaters. Sweaters are evil. Therefore, Jobs is evil, and so is Apple.

Re:Perfect quality!

[QuantumG]

$3? $3?!!

For $3 per song I want the band to come play live in my drinking establishment.

$3.