What those thirty cents buy you

Earlier today, Scott posted details of the new EMI upgrade pricing. It's going to cost you thirty cents to upgrade your music to the new higher-quality DRM-free tracks. So what do those thirty cents buy you? Here's a quick run down of the highlights.

Music Quality. First and most obviously, you're buying better quality music. The new 256 kbps AAC tracks offer twice the bitrate of the current DRM'ed selections. More bits mean that the music will be more faithful to the original audio quality. Can your ears really tell the difference? It depends on the kind of listener you are. My sister buys high-end speakers and goes on about the audio experience. Me, I still listen to audio tapes I've ripped to iTunes.

Interoperability. No DRM means that your music will play back on many more platforms, like the Zune. Of course if your media player doesn't support AAC, you're kind of out of luck unless you want to convert your music or buy a better player (which the lack of DRM makes possible). Interoperability also means you can better take advantage of fair use in other media like videos.

Best of both worlds. For your thirty cent upgrade, you will presumably own both the original track you downloaded as well as the better quality larger track you upgraded to. If you own a small shuffle as well as a larger nano, iPhone or video iPod, you might be able to create separate syncs to take advantage of the space-versus-quality versions of your tracks. This means a lot of extra work and it means you will need to buy your music twice. At least until Apple discontinues its 99-cent DRM pricing model, which is a door that these new $1.29 tracks opens.

Convenience. It's not exactly a secret that you've long been able to burn your iTunes purchases to CD and then rip them back without DRM. But for thirty cents, you can now skip the burn/rip step and save yourself a bit of time. If DRM-free music has an intrinsic value to you, perhaps those thirty cents isn't too high a price to pay to skip the work of doing it all by hand.

View Tags

Source: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html

Categories

Analysis / Opinion iTS

Earlier today, Scott posted details of the new EMI upgrade pricing. It's going to cost you thirty cents to upgrade your music to the new...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

21 Comments

Filter by:

tuaw

"If you own a small shuffle as well as a larger nano, iPhone or video iPod, you might be able to create separate syncs to take advantage of the space-versus-quality versions of your tracks. This means a lot of extra work and it means you will need to buy your music twice."

If you wanted a more portable 128kbps version of a track, why would you need to buy it at both bitrates? Buy only the 256kbps file, change your iTunes ripping preferences to 128, and select "convert" -- which now works since DRM is gone. Now you've got a smaller file for your phone or shuffle or whatever.

April 03 2007 at 4:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

If your software only plays MP3, then upgrade to better software or transcode it. If you already have hardware that only plays MP3, then you can still transcode it. Even my Tapwave PDA can play AAC, if not natively, through a third party program. iTunes can transcode it to any bitrate that you like, to several different CODECs. Transcoding should take less than a minute per track on any useful machine.

MP3 is good mainly because it plays in just about anything, but bit for bit, it's got the worst audio quality for bit rate ratio short of Sony's ATRAC.

April 03 2007 at 4:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Patrick

Higher quality is nice, but what I REALLY, REALLY want is a subscription model... I wan to pay less for all-you-can-eat rental access to the lower 128 kpbs AAC tracks, and pay more to own the higher-quality tracks.

Maybe this is Steve's endgame?

April 03 2007 at 2:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

matt

You can convert ACC to MP3 from within iTunes. Click Preferences, Advanced, Importing and change Import Using: to MP3 encoder. Change the settings around to what you want. Then right click a song in the iTunes library and click Convert Selection to MP3.

matt

April 02 2007 at 11:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Lundie

iTunes will automatically convert everything to 128kb/s for iPod shuffles if you want that.

April 02 2007 at 7:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bryan Walls

It strikes me that this makes "Complete My Album" a lot more attractive for EMI content. I get the high quality version of some favorite songs from a particular album, plus the other songs on the album, also DRM free and higher quality, for just the difference in cost from what I already paid.

It would sound better if I'd actually ever paid for an iTunes song. My 7000-odd songs are all either from CD, or free downloads.

April 02 2007 at 7:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Galley

The only way there gonna get me to buy full albums if if they offer lossless files for $9.99. Even then I can usually buy the CD (new) for less.

April 02 2007 at 7:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon

I won't be paying the extra .30 for the higher quality un-DRMed songs. Why? Because I only have an iPod and I only use it in my car (which has a crappy stereo) and on the plane (where I can barely hear it over the engine anyway). I'm really grateful that Apple left the option for people like me who have no need for the more expensive songs.

April 02 2007 at 6:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tony

"How about giving users what they really wanted: same quality, no DRM."

Because that's NOT what users really wanted. One of the biggest (and loudest) complaints about the iTunes Store (aside from DRM) has been the relatively low bitrate. Users have been SCREAMING for higher bitrates for a long time...pretty much since day one.

Higher bitrates and no DRM is one of the reasons eMusic is so popular...

April 02 2007 at 6:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Aaron

Maybe the higher bit-rate was done so that when you down-convert the file to mp3 you still get a good quality file?

April 02 2007 at 6:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply