It’s not often you’ll see an Apple related post on here…I’m not a big fan of His Steveness et al…but this is a big one.
iTunes will be completely DRM free by Spring/end of Q1, so late March/early April time and it’s about time too! Despite my opposition to Apple, I have to admit that, as a concept, iTunes is great (let’s not get into how slow, sluggish and buggy it can be) but only being able to play the tracks in iTunes really winds me up. Either that, or having to double up on everything in various formats in various placed just makes things complicated…and it’s an extra thing that you have to explain to parents 🙂
The big change that has allowed this is variable pricing so newer, more popular “bangers” will be around $1.29 but on the flip side-older songs will be as low as $0.69.
One thing that is very exciting about this is that Microsoft recently announced that Windows 7 will be able to play AAC files natively, so once they’re DRM free you can buy them from iTunes and then easily play them in Windows Media Player…nice 🙂
These two announcements being so close together does make me wonder if Bill & Steve had a little chat and decided to play nice!
I’m now trying to find out if this is going to be a US only thing, or if we’ll get it here in the UK too. I’ll update as soon as I know.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 