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DRM-free iTunes, with an annoying catch
One of the big bits of news from the Macworld keynote is that the iTunes Music Store will be going DRM-free, with three different prices for songs based on the label's pricing. Here's the official press release from Apple.
Of course, there's a catch. There are probably a few, but when my colleague David Pescovitz gave me the news direct from his iPhone this morning, the first thing I asked was, "What about the locked tracks you already own?" Well, you can "upgrade" them to the DRM-free versions... for an extra 30 cents per track or 30% of album price. So that elevates any locked tracks you've already purchased from iTunes to the highest offered price point if you want to buy the high-quality unlocked version from them (instead of, say, burning it to a CD and ripping it back).
A friend of mine just went to the iTunes store and clicked on "Upgrade My Library" to calculate how much it would cost (assuming his tracks were all from DRM tracks purchased from the store) and it tells him, "$430 to upgrade 1,772 songs from 72 albums." I don't even want to know what it would have to say about my 6,437 tracks. Of course, I could never have afforded to buy that many tracks from iTunes in the first place. But say I had. I've already paid for the music, now I'd have to pay to have a version that I can use on as many devices as I want, which I should have had when I bought the track in the first place?
Then again, as someone commented on Y Combinator:
You don't have to have it without DRM, and you don't have to pay if you want it to not have DRM. What you're paying less than full price for is a completely different bitstream that happens to be encoded from the same original source. It's not unlike getting a credit toward a CD because you happened to own a tape of the same music, which I think you can agree is a rather novel concept.
I realize I should be jumping for joy over the DRM-free offerings, and it is a nice development, finally, but the upgrade fee doesn't sit very well with me. And for the record, I'm not blaming Apple since the fee was likely have part of the negotiation with the labels.