While Steve Jobs wasn’t personally at Macworld to reveal that iTunes was going DRM-free and OTA downloadable, he’s the one who made it happen—he bullied Sony Music’s chairman over the phone on Christmas Eve.
Though we’re glad iTunes went DRM-free, we were pissed you had to upgrade your entire collection to DRM-less, 256kbps bliss. But now you can upgrade individual tracks (30 cents each) or albums (prices vary). [iLounge]
I knew I had a full-blown music-purchasing problem when I went to “upgrade” my iTunes collection—raising the quality and stripping the pestilential DRM—and the grand total came to an all-or-nothing $US250.
Yes, iTunes embeds your email address in its DRM-free iTunes Plus files, which now make up the entire iTunes store. But don’t panic—it’s been like this since iTunes Plus launched.
Apple’s Macworld announcement that the entire iTunes catalogue is ditching the God-awful DRM that has kept it back is fantastic news for music lovers worldwide. After all, now you can purchase music that you can listen to on whatever device you want, however many times you want, all for the same price (until their new pricing structure kicks in, I guess). But what about the tunes you’ve already purchased, laced with hidden DRM and holding your music collection back?
Well, despite the fact that you can purchase the same tracks for the same price without DRM, if you’ve already purchased a DRM-encoded version, you’ll need to pay Apple 50 cents per track to remove the restrictions, or $1.00 per track for music videos. More »
iTunes is going DRM free and breaking their single-price rule with three points: 69 US cents, 99 US cents, and $US1.29. Not surprised, given the pressure from other music stores. The iPhone will allow 3G downloads too.
Speculation about if when iTunes would score DRM-free tracks from all major studios like Amazon and Walmart has been rampant, but according to a rumour at AppleInsider, all this speculation may come to an end tomorrow.
I generally don’t buy music online – I’m still a purist at heart who likes to own all my music on CDs. If I was planning on spending some online dollars on some tunes though, I’d be all over this deal from BigPond – essentially they’re offering 50% off the price of a $50 or $100 BigPond Music gift card. You can’t pick them up online, which means you actually have to go to the shops, but considering BigPond sell a good chunk of their music (from all the majors) in non-DRM’d MP3 format, it’s easy to buy the music from BigPond then transfer it over to iTunes (or other music management software for the half-dozen Apple haters out there). Deal runs until December 31st, so maybe it’s that perfect last-minute Xmas gift for that hard to please colleague?
[BigPond Music via Lifehacker] More »
Microsoft’s $US15 Zune Pass subscription service—a pretty sweet deal already—has just porked up their offer by giving you 10 free songs that you can keep every month. We’ve talked about Zune Pass in our Zune reviews before, but it’s basically access to all of the Zune Marketplace for only the price of a CD a month. Since most of their catalog (90% or so, including all the majors and a few indie labels) is already in MP3 format, you can load these free songs on any kind of device you want, like your iPhone or Android phone or PS3 or Wii.
