A few days back I found myself perusing the iTunes Music Storelooking for a few songs that I had heard via Sirius*. After completing the painless process of purchasing the songs, I immediately synced the tracks to my iPhone and went on my merry way. Because I had spent very little none of my time following the DRM vs. DRM-free music download optionbeing offered by Apple, I simply downloaded the $0.99 version(s).
DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
Great. So Apple now offers DRM-free tracks from EMI as well as an option to upgrade existing DRM locked songs to their DRM-free variant for $1.29 or $0.30 respectively. Want to find out which songs are offered as DRM-free purchases? Open the iTunes Music Store and navigate through iTunes Plus.. Here you may find some of the songs you are looking for. You may also come to realize that songs you may want to download DRM-free are not available.
So what options do you have if the song you wish to purchase is not available? While you can always ask uncle Bittorrent,, possible run-ins with your ISP and the law may not sound all too enticing. The safest – and legal – route would be to purchase the songs through the iTunes Music Store. Personally, the rule that would allow an individual to authorize a track for playback on up to 5 machines is something I find acceptable for a digital medium which I purchased. Furthermore, I hate the fact that if I am signed out of the iTunes Music Store, I need to continue to keep a machine authorized or enter my Apple ID & password in order to listen to a song.
