According to this post up at TUAW (and most of the remainder of the online tech community), Apple will be offering up DRM-free EMI tracks beginning in May. Upgrades will be offered for previously purchased tracks, and newly purchased individual tracks will be priced at $1.29 (full albums in DRM-free state remain $9.99). DRM laden tracks will still be available for the same price for those concerned that Apple might be pulling a little bait and switch. As an added bonus the tracks will be at “twice the quality” of DRM loaded tracks. Hopefully that means encoding at twice the bitrate or around 256kbits AAC which is nothing to sneeze at.I guess that means that Jobs wasn’t full of it after all when he wrote his piece that appeared on the Apple website. I wonder if this agenda was there from the get-go, or whether this has evolved now that the music industry is entangled in Apple’s web.
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