Apple To Grant All Labels DRM-Free Distribution

SexCaptain writes "MacRumors.com reveals a letter circulated by Apple to all producers of content for the iTunes Store, announcing that from May onward they can sell their music at higher quality and free of DRM. Hopefully this opens the doors for labels like Netwerk. This is a big step in the right direction, although it's unclear exactly what Apple means by 'higher quality,' and there is no mention of price changes. (Apple charges $0.30 more per song for DRM-free content from EMI and encodes it at 256K.) Quoting from the letter: 'Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free," Apple wrote in the communication. "Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."

Competition for emusic

This could get really interesting. Of course emusic uses the more ubiquitous mp3, bt I bet eveyr 'mp3' player will now come playing unprotected aac as standard now Apple is making things interesting.

Re:Competition for emusic

Agreed. It's now significantly more expensive to buy music from Apple compared to Wal-mart. This is progress?

Re:Competition for emusic

What you're missing is that anyone can now release DRM-free 256kbit/s music. This means that small labels will have advantages against RIAA labels (EMI aside) who might be reluctant to release DRM-free music.

The policy of iTunes has always been (AFAIK) to have a fixed price for individual songs, but a varied price for albums. Hence an indie band can release a DRM-free 256kbit/s album for $8 if they want to... This might mean we see some real competition in the commercial music scene... finally!

Also, allow me to plug eMusic (www.emusic.com) - You can't beat it for discovering great new music. No personal affiliation, just a satisfied customer. Magnatune seems good too.

Re:Competition for emusic

The album price is the same for DRM free, higher quality... $9.99 for most albums. That makes the convenience and lack of censorship worth every penny. It isn't like you can buy a single DRM free track from Walmart either.

Re:Competition for emusic

Yay for Apple fan logic.

Generally I would expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc, would result in the end product being cheaper due to the lack of need to pay for all that stuff... but no, somehow delivering less is a "feature" that makes sense to pay extra money for.

Don't get me wrong, I don't care much for the packaging either, but calling it progress to pay extra for the lack of something is quite bizarre.

Re:Competition for emusic

calling it progress to pay extra for the lack of something is quite bizarre.

Not when you can have soup for $1, or bodily-fluid free soup for $5.

Re:Competition for emusic

The cost of downloaded music by all logic should be below the half of what the CD of the same stuff costs.

You are only looking at a fraction of the actual costs. How do you know what Apple's costs are, vs. the costs incurred by a physical distribution company? The costs are not just for the physical media and distribution, or the network bandwidth, iTMS development and hosting costs, but also the negotiated per-title royalties that must be paid. The labels get their cut, and that's probably the most expensive component of the price.

And even after all that, sure, Apple's costs may be lower. But Apple's prices are apparently higher by your measure, and I think that's why you're complaining.

You see, there's this funny idea called 'Capitalism'. Capitalism pretty much means "if you want to sell a product at whatever price you want to sell it, go for it. If you make money, congratulations. If you lose money, tough." The corollary to that is "if you want something and are willing to pay the asked-for price, you can buy it. If you are unwilling to pay that price, you can try to negotiate a new lower price, shop elsewhere, or go without."

So if you think a DRM-free song is worth only $0.25, why not write to Apple and ask them to sell you that song for $0.25? If they're unwilling to negotiate with you, then you are free to go to another source and pay their asking price. Otherwise, contact the record labels yourself and start a music distribution business of your own, set your prices at $0.25, and make lots of money. Let us know how that works out for you.

ITunes Producer now uses Apple Lossless

They used to like 128kbps AAC uploaded to them, but now they want lossless - so it's been on the cards for a while (not the DRM free, but higher quality). Anyway, means they can encode to anything they want for all the new stuff without having to transcode. Hasn't helped with their congested servers though.

Apropo of nothing I suppose, but thought it might be interesting.

Re:ITunes Producer now uses Apple Lossless

And the answer is, they don't want to be in the music business, at least no more than they have to be. The only reason they are curently is because the music business provides content for their hardware business, which is where the real money is made. The iTunes Store is effectively a loss-leader to sell iPods. Jobs has said as much already.

Obvious?

This is a big step in the right direction, although it's unclear exactly what Apple means by 'higher quality,' and there is no mention of price changes.

It seems pretty clear to me-- they're offering the same pricing scheme that they've announced with EMI. They will continue to sell 128 kbps DRM-wrapped AACs for $0.99, but will additionally offer 256kbps DRM-free AACs for $1.29. Anyone familiar with Apple's tactics will tell you that they'll want to keep it simple. They'll offer the same pricing for the same product across the board.

I'd guess that this is all transitional anyway. Apple will continue to try to pressure labels to drop prices and remove DRM on everything. In the mean time, this is a step in the right direction.

Perfect quality!

I'll give them $2.00 a song if they will give up on this compressed stuff and sell me lossless. I'd like to have the same music that comes on the real CD. That way I can compare a checksum with a "global public" value, and make sure they haven't watermarked the song. They could even go to $3.00 a song for people who are aficionados and release the 24 bit stuff.

So we have...

          $0.99 = DRM'ed AAC at 128kbps
          $1.30 = Non-DRM'ed AAC at 256kbps
          $2.00 = Non-DRM'ed, lossless.
          $3.00 = Non-DRM'ed, 96KHz-24bit per Channel.

Still dreaming.

Re:Perfect quality!

$3? $3?!!

For $3 per song I want the band to come play live in my drinking establishment.

$3.

Now we just need free pricing.

Hopefully Apple will eventually allow labels to set their own prices. There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of old songs languishing at barely measurable sales numbers-I think that a hell of a lot of those could sell pretty well at $.25 or $.50. We could see back-catalog price wars! It would also allow smaller labels labels and independent musicians to compete by leveraging their lower overheads--one can sell for less when a album was self-produced in a week with no advance and no A&R guys to feed.

There's the rub

It would also allow smaller labels labels and independent musicians to compete by leveraging their lower overheads--one can sell for less when a album was self-produced in a week with no advance and no A&R guys to feed.

This is exactly why I'd expect the RIAA to pull out of iTunes if they allow this. No matter what, they don't want an efficient market - not when they're selling artificial scarcity.

It's interesting to see Apple as the potentate with the ability to change the music industry with small changes in policy. I think they're doing a good job as benovolent dictator, but there's some deeper meaning, I'm sure, to the fact that iTunes is only 5 years old and we're talking about things this way. The power of the Internet to change markets, demonstrated, perhaps.

Translation

"Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free. Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."

Translation from Jobs-esque:

"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."

Wait a minute

How am I supposed to manage my digital rights now?

This sucks

When Jobs came out with his "Thoughts on Music", I made all kinds of cynical comments saying that he was being disingenious for this or that reason. After all, Job's in incredibly successful and people all over the world laud him and his company's products, so he NEEDS to be brought down a notch.

Well now he's making me look like an ass.

Jobs and Apple are still EVIL

To sum up the list of objections to this move by Apple:

• Apple is still not offering something for nothing, which pisses me off.
• This is just a big PR stunt. Apple isn't really doing this for the right reasons, so it's still wrong.
• This should have been done a long time ago, so the fact that they're doing it now makes it evil.
• Apple is just trying to make their EVIL, proprietary AAC (Apple Audio Compression) dominate the free, open, wonderful MP3 format!
• I don't like iTunes, therefore this move toward the elimination of DRM in music doesn't help me. This is Apple's fault. They're evil.
• Steve Jobs wears sweaters. I hate sweaters. Sweaters are evil. Therefore, Jobs is evil, and so is Apple.

Re:Jobs and Apple are still EVIL

He wears turtleneck sweaters ok? If that aint Dr Fuckin' Evil, I don't know what is.

Re:Why Pay more?

The price of DRM-free albums remains unchanged. It's only DRM-free singles that go up in price to $1.29.

Re:What we reallly want...

what Apple wants is their AAC to become the defacto standard over mp3.

AAC [wikipedia.org] isn't Apple's codec. It's the MPEG group's replacement for MP3.

Re:Is Apple going to extend that grant?

I don't normally respond to trolls, but it brings up an interesting topic for conversation, so why not?

Why is DRM okay in some contexts, but not others? Is it evil to apply DRM to music but not software? What about movies?

I think that music is something that we are naturally possessed with - it probably coincides with the emergence of humanity. We hum, we whistle, we walk around with our Walkmen and our iPods. We even amended our copyright law to give music a special exemption for format-shifting and copying for personal use. I think this is why DRM on music offends us so much... DRM prevents us from doing something that we as a society have already decided we should be able to do!

Movies and software, on the other hand, aren't in the same ball park. Movies have only recently become part of our culture, and it was only 30 years ago that you could realistically bring them into your home. It's only been about 5 years since it became feasible to walk around with them, and that's still awkward. Maybe we'll feel more strongly about movies as technology makes format shifting more important. It already irritates me that I have to jump through hoops to back up stuff.

Software - I think it will be a long time before society gets worked up over software... after all, the best software is invisible. Besides, the whole concept of format-shifting is hard to apply to software. I mean, the kind of software application that you expect to work on you Desktop computer is pretty unsuitable for your cell phone.

Re:Is Apple going to extend that grant?

I'm very skeptical that it will be OSX in anything but name, or possibly kernel. But almost any application that is suitable for a phone would not be very usable on a desktop and vice versa. Video games have a much higher threshold on a desktop. Excel would be a travesty on a phone. Even the VNC version that I have on my desktop would positively suck on a phone. Even phone-centered apps like Address Book or iCal are not suited to the tiny screen on the iPhone.

Even if the iPhone worked perfectly with all OSX applications, it would be but one example in an ocean of counter-examples. I have never seen a Palm or WindowsMobile application that is as functional as it's desktop equivalent.

I'm not saying that DRM doesn't restrict software - clearly it does (as in your vmware example). I'm just saying that we, as a society, seem to hold software to a different standard than music, and I was simply pontificating on why I thought that was the case.

I think that video is somewhere in between the two - perhaps when it takes less than 2 hours to encode a H264 movie people will start to care more. Right now, ripping a CD takes about 2 minutes and it's pretty bulletproof.

Re:Zunior.com

Their entire catalog [zunior.com] is in non-DRM format and they have been doing it this way for a lot longer than Apple.

Your argument is significantly undermined by the fact that their entire catalog consists of artists and labels I've never heard of before in my life.

They could price their albums at $1.25 apiece, and most people still wouldn't be interested.

Re:Whoopty-do. AAC itself is proprietary and locke

This announcement doesn't mean much at all. AAC is still a proprietary format that only exists in Apple's reality sphere, and outside of iPods and Macs, doesn't have much reason to exist at all other than to have yet another standard out there. AAC is a format only used by two types of people: iTunes customers who have no choice, and the rabid Mac fanatics who will happily jump to a locked, patent encumbered protocol because Apple approves it.

When Apple comes to the table with something industry standard like MP3, OGG, FLAC, uncompressed WAV, or even (gasp!) WMA, then this will be a newsmaking event. Otherwise, its just the same old stuff. People's music is still locked down in a non-standard format nobody would even go near if it wasn't Apple's baby.

You are either a uninformed troll or an MS shill but again for the record: AAC [wikipedia.org] is a part of the MPEG standard that is used by many other players like Sony's PS3, MS Zune, SanDisk Sansa e200R, numerous cell phones, etc. The licensing scheme of AAC is even more generous than MP3 as there is no license on distributed content. Also for the record, WMA has never been the industry standard. It was a standard foisted up us by MS which actually suffers from the same defects that you claim about AAC. If you change AAC in your ranting with WMA and Apple with MS, your statements would actually be true.