News

iTunes 7.2 Adds DRM-free Music Support

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 8:15 AM - by

Apple released iTunes 7.2 late on Tuesday with support for iTunes Plus music. The update to Apple's media player and management application added support for higher audio quality copy protection-free tracks.


iTunes 7.2

Apple and EMI announced a deal in April to offer music through the iTunes Store at a higher audio quality and without any copy protection schemes in place. The deal will eventually include all of EMI's music library.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated that the higher quality songs would be available in May, and the release of iTunes 7.2 means that the iTunes Store should be able to bring the tracks online before the end of the month. Individual tracks will be available for US$1.29 instead of the usual $0.99.

iTunes 7.2 is available as a free download for Mac and Windows at the Apple Web site.

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vasic said:

member since 09 Aug 2005 with 215 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed May 30, 2007 9:28 am

All we need now is for Apple to demonstrate that they can sustain the growth rate of iTunes Store with the DRM-free tracks. All this time, the argument (from S. Jobs) was that DRM was not necessary in order to protect music; that vast majority of consumers are honest and won't go about wanton distribution of these DRM-free files. We will now need to prove this to the labels. If Apple sells millions of DRM-free tracks every month, and continues to sell them month over month, year over year, then it won't matter if they show up on eDonkey or LimeWire. Consequently, S.J should be able to easily persuade Universal to go the way of EMI. Once Universal is there, Warner, Sony and others will have to follow.

Next step - movies (blu-ray and HD-DVD, if it lives), and doing away with DRM there.

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Intruder said:

member since 07 Jul 2004 with 2833 posts, TMO Mac Specialist, send him a message or view his profile

Wed May 30, 2007 9:34 am

I suspect (but don't know for sure) that, since there is an update to iTunes required to support the new downloads, there is some form of watermarking being done to track down those tunes that end up on P2P and link them back to the original purchaser.

Just a suspicion.

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vasic said:

member since 09 Aug 2005 with 215 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed May 30, 2007 9:47 am

Not necessarily watermarking; just serialising. The idea itself sounds quite reasonable. You give your consumers freedom, treat them as your customers, rather than criminals trying to steal from you. Every normal consumer will appreciate that. For those that are there to abuse this, you append a serial number (somewhere in the meta-data, together with the song name, album art and such) and easily track the perpetrator.

I'm sure SJ thought of this originally, when he first negotiated with labels for iTMS. I'm also sure that labels, with their collective myopia, categorically refused. It's good that EMI suits decided to take a chance. Let's all hope SJ is right now as much as he was a few years back when he first opened iTMS.

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