Apple – DRM = More money?

Apple announced that they are now selling Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free music on iTunes for $1.29 a song, as opposed to $0.99 for DRM songs.  Currently, the DRM songs can only be listened to on computers that you have activated on your iTunes account – you are limited to five active computers at any one time.  On a positive note, the new “iTunes Plus” songs will have twice the bitrate as old iTunes songs – 256kb/s vs. 128kb/s.  You can upgrade your old iTunes songs to new iTunes Plus songs for $0.30.  Apple will still offer $0.99 standard songs.

Yeah, this is a move in the right direction… but it’s silly to make people pay to get rid of the arbitrary copy-protection scheme Apple put on their songs, especially when you can get rid of the copy-protection yourself by burning the tracks to a CD and ripping the CD to MP3s.  Apple should have offered DRM-free music from the get-go but I’m glad they are offering it now – especially with higher resolution recordings (ahem… which is another thing they should have done from the start).

The part that puzzles me about this announcement is the $0.30 upgrade for your current songs.  Before, once you purchased a track from iTunes, you were SOL if you deleted the file.  That’s right, you couldn’t redownload a song you purchased.  But you needed to connect to the server to validate your account in order to play the song in the first place.  That’s a lot of back-assery!  Another nice move would be the availability to access your iTunes account and download songs from any activated computer.  Unfortunately, Apple seems to be raking in the cash with their current user-impaired model so it’s unlikely they’ll change anytime soon.

-Bob