This isn’t going to surprise anyone, but I don’t download music from iTunes.
My reasons for this are numerous, but it’s mainly that I have a problem spending a dollar per song on music that I don’t physically own. Throw that in with my love for the high quality of records and the fear of losing all my music in a random hard drive crash (as I did a couple months ago), and there are very few offers tempting enough for me to pay the iTunes store (or any other download-based retailer) a visit.
But the people at Apple seem hell-bent on making my struggle against iTunes as difficult as possible. Their latest assault on my island of spinning black vinyl has come in the form of an agreement with EMI Records to sell DRM-free music on the iTunes Store.
For those of you who don’t know, DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management” and is better known as the annoying little thing that keeps you from playing your music on other computers and prevents you from burning more than a few CD-R copies of downloaded tracks ““ not to mention sharing them with your friends.
The removal of DRM will also be accompanied by digital music available in a higher quality, offering files encoded at 256 kilobits per second, surpassing both current iTunes files (128 kbps) as well as the MP3-pirating consensus (192 kbps). The new iTunes downloads are still in Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format rather than the more universal MP3 codec, however, which means you still won’t be able to use them with non-iPod digital players.
Now, if this were just for EMI Records’ music, I wouldn’t be too torn up ““ it’s not like I’m going out and buying Iron Maiden and Kraftwerk albums anyway. But Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has announced that Apple expects to make over half of all iTunes music DRM-free by the end of the year.
I’ll give Apple this much: they know what they’re doing. No more low-quality tracks to complain about, no more painfully annoying use of DRM. It seems that Jobs has finally come to terms with the fact that pretty much anyone can download high-quality music for free anyway and has decided to stop clinging so desperately to copyright laws in an environment that immediately made them obsolete.
There is one catch, however. The music EMI is purging of DRM is going to cost 30 cents more than the 99 cents people have gotten used to. The obvious question: are these tracks worth the extra 30 cents?
For people already caught up in the iTunes craze, higher-quality music probably isn’t a priority. And for the technologically inclined, DRM can be circumvented with the right hacks. For consumers not yet converted to digital music, however, the more expensive tracks will be a little more tempting, especially when considering that whole albums free of DRM are being sold for the same price (about $10) that they were previously.
With CD-quality audio and the ability to share the files as much as you want, it’s only the music buyers that value physical copies of albums that have any legitimate reason to resist.
iTunes is still far from perfect, but, as for now, Apple has set in motion a project and an understanding of digital music culture that will most definitely give hard copies a run for their money.
Whether this is a positive step for music or not is totally subjective, but for now, it seems that the benefits of paying Amoeba Music a visit are slipping away.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to hug my record collection and tell it how much I appreciate it.
If you have a love/hate relationship with digital music, e-mail Duhamel at dduhamel@media.ucla.edu.