Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Announces Changes to iTunes Store

I must say I was afraid of this happening. I've been following the news of Apple's discussions with the record labels and hoping that someday they'd go DRM-free, but was hoping that it would be one label at a time like dominoes. This would make it somewhat more palatable in terms of rationalizing the upgrade if it was in parts.

When you see it all in one lump, it's somewhat shocking. (And that's knowing that the entire library hasn't been updated yet, it will only go higher.) I am glad that about six months ago I stopped buying any DRM songs from iTunes and either 1.) bought the alternative from Amazon 2.) found it on a physical CD I was willing to buy or 3.) left it in the shopping cart.

I will probably upgrade but I do want to see what others experience is first. I know that when there was a relatively large influx of Itunes Plus songs which I could upgrade before this, I had over 100 songs to upgrade and had problems downloading them.

I think there was a conflict in the software which was preventing me from proceeding due to the number of songs. Only after going back and forth with a customer service rep over a few days time was it resolved (and only by them manually putting about 20-25 songs into my download que and having me download the batch before adding another batch, which was a time-consuming process on both ends). I'm hoping I don't run into a similar issue if I end up upgrading the rest of my DRM-ed songs.
 
boer said:
Yes, you knowingly paid for 128 kbps DRM-protected songs. That purchase did not include any upgrade service that would extend beyond the purchase. iTunes is now offering 256 kbps DRM-free versions of those songs. On what basis should one get a free upgrade?

I don't expect a free upgrade to my song puchases any more than I expect a free upgrade to my car when a new engine is available from the manufactorer or to my iPod when a new version with more memory is released.

A purchase is a purchase and you are stuck with what you have bought. Get over it.
Click to expand...

But you can't make an analogy between a physical thing and an imaginary software item. You don't get a new engine because an engine requires raw materials and humans to manufacture and assemble. It's am embarrassment to itunes that you can't re-download something you've already paid for as it is. The new songs aren't a new product or something that's going to take any work to get you your own copy. This isn't even like a software update where a team of people have been engineering something for years and need to be paid. All these songs are going to be re-ripped and put up for sale Letting you upgrade is no work at all by anyone. Even if you don't want free, how do you justify 30 cents? Of even better yet, how do they justify "all or nothing" upgrades? What if I want 3 songs upgraded but not the other 500? too bad?
 
teme said:
I doubt I will buy 1,29 tracks, unless they are some iTunes exclusives (b-sides, remixes, live performances) from my favorite artists. If that higher price point will lower sales enough, maybe it won't be that popular.
Click to expand...

If you're a teenage, you'll buy it anyway. If you're a grown-up, you'll put the $1.29 track into you "wish list" and let it sit there until it's not new any more and the price drops to .99, and then buy it. (provided you didn't jsut hop over to Amazon and buy it for .99 anyways.)
 
Uk?

A couple pf thoughts from the UK :-

1. To upgrade my library will cost a whopping £284. There is no way I am going to upgrade all my music. So the all or nothing approach means it is going to be nothing.

2. I can access the music store fine over my 3G connection, but when I try to buy a track it says it is more than 10MB and that I must use WiFi to purchase. So is there a 10MB limit in place, just like applications? It is not a long music track, only 5 mins, buy with 256 encoding the files are now much bigger.

3. No sign yet of what the UK prices will be, based on the current $0.99 = 79p rate we can expect $0.69 - 59p and $1.25 - 99p.
 
swissmann said:
I'm going to actually buy many more songs from iTunes now that I can easily throw them into Final Cut Pro.

I don't want to upgrade all of my music that I have just select songs - hopefully I'll find out a way to do that. (Should be free in my opinion except for the songs that cost $1.29.)

I wonder how many songs will be at each of the price points?

Are all tracks at 256 instead of 128 with this change?
Click to expand...

I'm with you. I never could get myself to pay even $.99 for a song with lower quality and limited usage. Except for that Ted Nugent song "Kiss my A**"
 
One thing I'd like to add to all of this:

iTunes can convert AAC to MP3 (or several other formats) as long as the AAC is DRM-free. It can even do it in batches. How to set it up is a little odd though: You need to change your preferences for what format you encode CDs into to MP3 (or whatever format) and then you can select tracks and use the menu option to convert to that format.

I've been checking the 'update by library' link for years, (and preferentially buying iTunes+ songs), so I only actually had a couple of albums I needed to upgrade.
 
johnmcboston said:
....The new songs aren't a new product or something that's going to take any work to get you your own copy....All these songs are going to be re-ripped and put up for sale Letting you upgrade is no work at all by anyone.
Click to expand...

You just contradicted yourself. Yes I know automation is a wonderful thing, and I don't think they have people sitting in front of machines ripping CDs, however that's not to say it wasn't a major undertaking to organize publishing the NEW content. Any tracks you purchased that were already in the iTunes Plus format were simply (comparatively) re-priced and won't be part of the upgrade.

For the tracks that were DRM'd before, these ARE new files, at a higher bitrate. Those new, larger files also require more bandwidth, bandwidth that someone has to purchase. How many billions of tracks has Apple sold? They should eat the cost of that bandwidth?

Don't trivialize the work that went into this, especially considering we got into this mess because of contractual obligations (read lawyers, read cost), and contracts are always a part of business.

O[r] even better yet, how do they justify "all or nothing" upgrades? What if I want 3 songs upgraded but not the other 500? too bad?
Click to expand...

I completely agree. I guess since it was "no work" to do this, though, they couldn't make changes to the system. Sarcasm aside, I don't think Apple properly prepared the iTunes infrastructure to handle the iTunes Plus upgrade both from a capacity and a consumer choice viewpoint.
 
i don't think i have bought anything since itunes+ was announced all that time ago, because not many albums i wanted were on it yet, and i wasn't going to go back to buying things i knew i had to upgrade for a cost in the future. so i went back to getting music for free. ill probably just keep doing that until they figure this out right.
 
Would this work as a workaround to select your songs for upgrading?

Remove the titles you don't want upgraded from your iTunes library.
Run the upgrade on your current library.
Add the titles you didn't upgrade back to your iTunes library.
 
TheDPR said:
Would this work as a workaround to select your songs for upgrading?

Remove the titles you don't want upgraded from your iTunes library.
Run the upgrade on your current library.
Add the titles you didn't upgrade back to your iTunes library.
Click to expand...
I don't think so, because iTunes will offer the upgrade if you've lost the DRM'd tracks (ex. due to accidental deletion). I wish it would though.
 
The difference

johnmcboston said:
But you can't make an analogy between a physical thing and an imaginary software item. You don't get a new engine because an engine requires raw materials and humans to manufacture and assemble. It's am embarrassment to itunes that you can't re-download something you've already paid for as it is. ...
Click to expand...

This is such an interesting argument, and really goes to the heart of piracy in general. On the one hand, the comparison between a physical product and an idea is false for the reasons John gave. On the other hand, software is not imaginary -- it's the product of real work that people need to be paid for. Otherwise, there would be no financial incentive to produce songs or software. The rub is that the electronic distribution of that software is so cheap as to be close to free. Because this distribution of real work is free, people mistake the work product itself as free.

When a person buys DRM songs at a medium quality (128), they have bought the right to use the product of other people's work in a limited way. When a person buys non-DRM songs at higher quality (256), they have bought the right to play higher quality songs in a less limited way. Those are different things, and it's rational to place a price difference on them.
 
Has anyone had problems upgrading? I get a message saying that the store has changed while I was upgrading and the thing that I'm trying to do isn't available. Moreover, if I go back to the store main page with my account, the option to upgrade my library is no longer there.

I WANT to give Apple my money. Why won't they let me give them my money?
 
Anyone complaining that they have to pay to "upgrade" their DRM'd songs has no leg to stand on. It's your fault for buying DRM'd crap in the first place. If you were willing to shell out your hard-earned cash for a DRM track you deserve what you get.

Thank God there's enough of us that refused to put up with that crap that the record companies have finally relented and realized they have to sell DRM-free music. If it were up to the sheep, they would've DRM'd us forever if they thought they could've gotten away with it.

I have no sympathy for you. Consider it a lesson learned. I'm sure it's not the first time you were ripped off by some industry or other, but if it is, congrats, you've undergone an experience that should make you think about your purchases more carefully in the future.
 
tveric said:
Anyone complaining that they have to pay to "upgrade" their DRM'd songs has no leg to stand on. It's your fault for buying DRM'd crap in the first place. If you were willing to shell out your hard-earned cash for a DRM track you deserve what you get.

Thank God there's enough of us that refused to put up with that crap that the record companies have finally relented and realized they have to sell DRM-free music. If it were up to the sheep, they would've DRM'd us forever if they thought they could've gotten away with it.

I have no sympathy for you. Consider it a lesson learned. I'm sure it's not the first time you were ripped off by some industry or other, but if it is, congrats, you've undergone an experience that should make you think about your purchases more carefully in the future.
Click to expand...

Without us actually buying music from the store and proving that there's a market, we'd never be in this position in the first place. Now that there are copy-cat stores and the labels realize that they can make money even WITHOUT onerous DRM in the way can we have what we've wanted all along.

Sometimes working with the system is easier than giving 'the man' the finger and hoping things will change for no reason at all other than your vitriol. By all accounts, the iTMS does good business even with the DRM in place.

I don't really have sympathy for the people that are complaining, either; you paid for a product, and it was given to you as advertised. Now there's a different product, and you're getting it at a steep discount. Suck it up or don't buy the tracks. Simple. If you don't like Apple's sandbox, take your ball and go home.
 
RealityMonster said:
I don't really have sympathy for the people that are complaining, either; you paid for a product, and it was given to you as advertised. Now there's a different product, and you're getting it at a steep discount. Suck it up or don't buy the tracks. Simple. If you don't like Apple's sandbox, take your ball and go home.
Click to expand...

Amen... while I wish they wouldn't delete or only partially upgrade things like bonus tracks and pre-order incentives that are no longer available in the store, it's not like they don't have a backup SOMEPLACE to at least give those of us who got the bonuses the same content in this new format. I'll shell out for it again!

However, what made me post was wanting to echo your sentiment in the last sentence there... this isn't a necessity, and there have been options for better sound quality from the launch of the store (aside from exclusives, I suppose). I don't like paying the money, but no one's making me either, and I like the security of being free of the DRM now AND the higher quality. I like that I can truly play the stuff I've gotten on just about any digital media player.

By the way, if you want to see what's left in your library after upgrading that still has the DRM, do a smart playlist where "Kind" begins with "Protect" and bitrate = 128. Presto.
 
dwsolberg said:
This is such an interesting argument, and really goes to the heart of piracy in general. On the one hand, the comparison between a physical product and an idea is false for the reasons John gave. On the other hand, software is not imaginary -- it's the product of real work that people need to be paid for. Otherwise, there would be no financial incentive to produce songs or software. The rub is that the electronic distribution of that software is so cheap as to be close to free. Because this distribution of real work is free, people mistake the work product itself as free.

When a person buys DRM songs at a medium quality (128), they have bought the right to use the product of other people's work in a limited way. When a person buys non-DRM songs at higher quality (256), they have bought the right to play higher quality songs in a less limited way. Those are different things, and it's rational to place a price difference on them.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's rational to put a price difference on them. But the problem is, Apple hasn't. The DRM higher-bit rate versions are the same price as the normal, which is where a lot of the bitterness is coming from. I know Apple originally started offering iTunes + at a higher cost, but they didn't sell well. Hopefully this is the same as the 1.29 versions of songs.

Regardless, if Apple really stood up to their ideals that songs were always meant to be DRM-free, and that it was a limitation imposed by the record companies, they would offer the upgrade now for much less. See, if it's a limitation, like they claim, then they shouldn't be charging to REMOVE said limitation that should never have been there. DRM was an experiment by the record companies, one that obviously failed. I could understand if the record companies are charging some blanket fee, and Apple is simply passing this to the customers - but do consider that the ones who are paying this fee are the ones who have already paid.

It comes down to this - there is an added cost to the DRM-free versions, but the only people who pay it are the people who are already customers. You can argue that that's the way it is with technology, that costs come down and so on , but remember, there was nothing stopping DRM-free songs from costing anything more back when iTunes started. Granted, higher quality means higher file size, band width storage and so on, but I dare to suggest that the higher bit-rate is simply a re-herring, tacked on to make you think you are getting SOMETHING for your upgrade price. Looks like this strategy worked on some.
 
teme said:
This strategy to get money from customers is one thing I really hate in Apple.
Click to expand...
Yes, how dare a corporation want money from their customers. :rolleyes:
They charged for additional iPod Touch updates, while new buyers got them for free. Now they are charging for iTunes track updates, while new buyers get them for the same price that I bought them earlier.
Click to expand...
Did new buyers get to use the product for as long as you have? No. Stop whining. Upgrades make sense. If you didn't want to pay, why didn't you wait?
But after all, maybe I would like to update some tracks, but I will not pay to update all the iTunes tracks I bought. For example, many times I have bought the first single and later bought an album with that same song, and I have deleted the separately bought first single. Now I have to pay 0,30e for a song that I will never need?
Click to expand...

Has anyone tried this:
- backup songs you don't want to upgrade
- remove those songs from your library
- upgrade "all" the songs - it will now only find the songs you want to upgrade (in theory)
- restore the old songs that you didn't want to upgrade.

Does that work, or does it use your purchase records?
 
teme said:
This strategy to get money from customers is one thing I really hate in Apple. They charged for additional iPod Touch updates, while new buyers got them for free. Now they are charging for iTunes track updates, while new buyers get them for the same price that I bought them earlier.

But after all, maybe I would like to update some tracks, but I will not pay to update all the iTunes tracks I bought. For example, many times I have bought the first single and later bought an album with that same song, and I have deleted the separately bought first single. Now I have to pay 0,30e for a song that I will never need?

It's interesting to see how 1,29 price point will change sales. I guess that they are trying to boost album sales with more expensive separate tracks, while the album prices will stay the same. I doubt I will buy 1,29 tracks, unless they are some iTunes exclusives (b-sides, remixes, live performances) from my favorite artists. If that higher price point will lower sales enough, maybe it won't be that popular.
Click to expand...

1. It is REQUIRED by law for accounting purposes for Apple to charge for iPod touch updates that include new features. For the iPhone it is not because of ongoing subscription costs.

2. It is REQUIRED by all the music companies that Apple charge for converting previously purchased iTunes DRM tracks to non-DRM. ie. you knew when you were paying 99 cents that you were getting 128 bitrate and DRM... so why should they (not Apple, the record companies) give you 256 bitrate and no-DRM without a charge?

3. Apple held the line on 99 cents for 6 years and CLEARLY wanted the price to stay at 99 cents but for the first time ever they were losing songs and buyers to Amazon's store (where everything is DRM free). The music companies refused to give all DRM free music to iTunes without a higher pricing structure and Apple finally had to give in. Sadly I do think any popular music is going to be $1.29 but at least it is double the quality and DRM free so you can play it on a Zune, an iPod, on 30 computers, on anything...
 
RealityMonster said:
Has anyone had problems upgrading? I get a message saying that the store has changed while I was upgrading and the thing that I'm trying to do isn't available. Moreover, if I go back to the store main page with my account, the option to upgrade my library is no longer there.

I WANT to give Apple my money. Why won't they let me give them my money?
Click to expand...

Check your account. It's possible that it's already activated, and just waiting downloading.
 
My girlfriends daughter, a 13 year old, gets iTunes cards as gifts. She uses my machine to buy and load her ipod mini. I have about 50 songs on my machine that are hers. I her case, upgrading would be a waste. The pod doesn't need the higher bitrate and I don't listen to her music. I myself am a CD buyer. Every once in awhile will buy a song but over the years I tend to get the CD if I like the song and end up deleting the iTunes track when I load the CD. The new iTunes is all good with me. Most of my wants are old music or New Age.
 
dwsolberg said:
This is such an interesting argument, and really goes to the heart of piracy in general. On the one hand, the comparison between a physical product and an idea is false for the reasons John gave. On the other hand, software is not imaginary -- it's the product of real work that people need to be paid for. Otherwise, there would be no financial incentive to produce songs or software. The rub is that the electronic distribution of that software is so cheap as to be close to free. Because this distribution of real work is free, people mistake the work product itself as free.
Click to expand...

Now we get to split hairs :) 'Soft' items are indeed not imaginary, but the word worked for that comparison. Distribution costs are close to zero for the point of this argument. If you have something electronically, your costs don't increase between sale 1 and sale 1 million. For software, you indeed need to pay for development and profit. Which is why we don't complain that they want money for yesterday's '09 products.

We get philosophical here because what you're getting for what cost. These songs have not been re-recorded, not re-mixed, not remastered. There has been no additional work by artist or anyone on the back side. This is 100% the same product - the song. During the process, they have made soft changes to the same electronic product - removal of DRM, and higher bit rate. One or both of those changes may be of interest to an individual.

So I've already paid for the 'rights' to this item, and paid for a copy of this soft item. So what should the cost to me be to get another copy of the same item?? Throw into that how Apple wants to look like a company, and add a touch of animosity towards the record labels, RIAA and anyone else we want to feel is wronging us :)

Back when I had albums, they told us we bought a physical item and the rights to listen to it to our hearts content. Then when they sold me CDs I said "But I already paid for the rights, so I should pay less". The companies laughed.

So now we're in the digital age. SO your favorite song is available in a digital format. But the same item is 99 cents here, 89 cents there, 20 cents in the indie store, and 1.49 in the rip off store; and some have one price for the song and another price for the same song if I buy the whole album. Some stores have DRM, some don't. Some have low bit rates, some have high. Some will let you re-download stuff you bought, some won't. Now all we have is confusion.

Price is now not so much about the song you want, but what the policy of a particular store is. Apple could allow us to upgrade for free. They could allow us no upgrade and pay 99 cents again, because the concept of 'rights' and product are pretty much buzzwords that are used at the convience of a corporation.

So apple chose upgrades for 30 cents. Why not free? why not 50 cents? 3 cents? Sliding rate. It pretty much has nothing to do any more with product or artist or rights or fairness. It has to do with mega corporations and who profits from what. I'll bet you those 30 cents the artists will see 0 to 1 cent for your re-purchase of their songs... So the question is who gets what and why...

And, of course, we just like whining. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back