[jrstirling8]

what can we do with drm free music?

[maddoguk]

I'll stick with Amazon

[natmusak]

@ everyone asking about upgrading your existing DRMed songs,

Go to the iTunes Store, click on the iTunes Plus link in the upper-right, and see for yourself. Same upgrade price: $0.30/song.

As for variable pricing, maybe Apple realized it should let the money hungry labels hang themselves and let them try to charge more per song with the economy the way it is. :D Maybe when they've learned their less they'll go back to $0.99/song like EMI did.

[nbidgood]

"Update My Library" under "iTunes Plus" confirms $0.30 per song (and $0.60 for music videos)

[cphoffman42]

@jrstirling - see my comment above.

[MorrisTheCat]

The first paragraph of this article is slightly misleading. At first glance it seems to imply that music AND videos will be offered DRM free, but this is music only, at this point.
That said, I sure would like to see the movie/video industry follow in the footsteps of music and start offering DRM free versions of their product But I'm not holding my breath for that. I understand that those folks are an even tougher crowd than the recording industry.
Still, this is good news overall.

[tewha]

Canadian upgrade price is 40¢ per track.
(Don't get excited, it was 40¢ before.)

[cphoffman42]

Ooh, are music videos going DRM-free, too? That's pretty cool. The main reason I haven't bought more video content from the iTunes store is my total fear that it will all be unuseable in about five years and the money would be totally wasted. Otherwise, I would probably buy all my TV shows on iTunes and save the energy/materials used for manufacturing/shipping DVDs.

[josh_nashville]

I found 49 of my previously-purchased iTunes tracks available to upload to DRM-free but almost 200 not yet available. A quick look at the top 100 songs also shows that most are not DRM-free yet. I wonder if the 8 million number is by later today or maybe in the next few days.

[jrstirling8]

Ok, got it. Thanks for the help!

[jdb8167]

maddoguk said:

I'll stick with Amazon

Why? With iTunes you get higher quality audio for approximately the same price? 256 kbps AAC is superior to 256 kbps mp3.

[chavonuevo]

$.30 to upgrade each song? Sorry, but F-you. I'm sorry I ever bought any broken music files (also known as music with DRM). This probably isn't Apple's fault, but I'm still pissed about it. I'm still buying music at Amazon because it's DRM free, it's 256K bitrate, and they have albums on sale for super low prices sometimes.
I will probably buy new DRM free music from Apple, but the "upgrade" cost is really disrespectful to all the people who have bought music from them over the last few years.

[natmusak]

MorrisTheCat said:

The first paragraph of this article is slightly misleading. At first glance it seems to imply that music AND videos will be offered DRM free, but this is music only, at this point.

That said, I sure would like to see the movie/video industry follow in the footsteps of music and start offering DRM free versions of their product But I'm not holding my breath for that. I understand that those folks are an even tougher crowd than the recording industry.

Still, this is good news overall.

There are already iTunes Plus music videos, but yeah, the same can't be said and likely won't be said about movies because movies have had some form of copy protection for years (VHS, DVD, BD, etc.), while it was very hypocritical of the big music labels to require copy protection on downloads when they were (and still are) selling millions of DRM-free CDs.

[vansie]

I haven't seen anyone talk about what songs will be priced according to the new 3-tier grid. Several photos of the accompanying slide seemed to indicate that all songs newer than 6 years will be straight 99 cents while songs 6 years and older will be divided up across the $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29 tiers.
Which if I may editorialize for a moment means that the Beatles got their premium pricing tier at $1.29, which Apple will try to sweeten with lower priced $0.69 songs. You win Yoko Ono, you win.