Over at Subtraction, Khoi Vinh and his merry band of commenters run down all the annoying details in Apple's dropping of Digital Rights Management from the iTunes store. To wit:
- You must pay a fee of 30 cents per song to upgrade your existing library to freedom.
- This despite the fact that many of the same songs will now be available DRM-free for only 69 cents.
- You must upgrade your entire library or none of it, with the total fee coming to $100 or more for many people.
- The fee will include any songs you may have bought and then deleted in the past!
Talk about a bitter pill. I have to say I'm glad I never bought anything from the store, but at the same time I never expected they would pull something quite like this.
Comments (3)
wowzers! i would indeed owe like $100.00!
January 23, 2009 9:47 PM
alright...ive done some actual experimentation
-turns out most (but not all) of what ive purchased over the past 6 months is already DRM-free.
-so, you can buy DRM-free without a completely DRM-free library
-DRM-free tracks cost the same as DRM
i admit to getting completely sold on itunes. first, i dont like stealing music on principle. second, i use my ipod every day at work and not allowed to have CDs in the office (dont ask-govt regulations make no sense). itunes is just SOOO easy. the "genius" feature is not perfect, but certainly value added. its chosen for me reasonably logical mixes of music from my library (though a lot of my collection its unfamiliar with (esp. non-itunes stuff) or cant make a match). I have a lot of classic singles mixed in with albums, so this is useful for grabbing the right singles at the right time.
January 25, 2009 12:23 PM
Were the DRM-free tracks you purchased over the past 6 months under the iTunes plus rubric? In that case, you would have paid more for them at the time, but also gotten higher quality files. Or are you saying that some tracks you purchased with DRM have now turned DRM-free, like Cinderella's glass slipper in reverse?
Undoubtedly iTunes offers a great user experience, even if you are just using it to import your CDs and not buying anything from the store. I didn't resist the store due to DRM concerns. I just wasn't listening to music on a portable device, and didn't want to pay $10 for an album in mp3 form. Personally I would prefer a subscription model with unlimited listening so that I could explore lots of different music freely without worrying about whether each song was worth a certain price. But so far that hasn't been offered in an attractive way.
January 26, 2009 3:13 PM