Apple has reportedly launched its new ‘iTunes Plus’ service which offers DRM-free music through the iTunes store. This means instead of only being able to play your music on an iPod you can now play the DRM-free downloads on any media player. So what’s the catch? Well, the songs cost an extra thirty cents per download, $1.29 for the “Plus” downloads instead of the regular $0.99 for DRM-protected songs through the iTunes store. Also, at the time of this posting the iTunes Plus service only supplied songs available from record company EMI. That’s still a ton of music though.

CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, spoke on the event saying “Our customers are very excited about the freedom, and amazing sound quality of ‘iTunes Plus’. We expect more than half of the songs on iTunes will be offered in ‘iTunes Plus’ versions by the end of this year.”

iTunes is offering its users a one-click option to upgrade any EMI content they had previously bought via the iTunes store to ‘iTunes Plus’ versions of those songs. The “Plus” media will be 256kbps AAC encoded, in keeping with current iTunes formatting.

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1 Comment »

Comment by Shawn M.

2007-05-31 17:06:43

Christ on a cracker. I’m all for the legal download of music, but paying 30 percent more so I can play my songs on other media devices? I’m officially calling shenanigans on Steve Jobs — that’s an option that should be free to everybody.

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