This is excellent news. While I did the all-at-once upgrade to the tune of $28 a few weeks ago, I'm pretty sure those were all songs/albums I would have wanted to upgrade anyway. My smart playlists tell me I still have 106 remaining songs that haven't been upgraded yet, and some of those were "test" purchases I made when the iTMS first opened. I bought a couple of songs I already owned on CD so I could do a double-blind listening test and see if the store quality was good enough for me. I certainly don't need to "upgrade" those songs, and now I won't have to when they move to iTunes Plus.
However, I'll also note that some of those 106 songs also will likely never be upgradeable. I posted this in another thread the other day, but it bears repeating here. I found at least 3 different circumstances where previously purchased songs were not eligible for upgrade in the iTMS:
- Apparently if you got the song for free (remember the Pepsi promotion several years ago), it's not eligible for upgrade. Although I've had success with some of the free songs I got, others refuse to upgrade.
- If you bought a single song, but that song was later converted to album-only, it is no longer eligible. This stinks because I bought a 4-song album piece by piece, as all 4 songs were available to purchase individually. Now that it's iTunes Plus, the two longer songs were made album-only. So my upgrade list only included 2 out of the 4 songs. If I had bought the album as a whole to begin with, the whole thing would have upgraded.
- If the record company deletes and re-uploads the song, iTunes Store considers it to be a different song. Therefore you never purchased it, so you can't upgrade it.
In addition to the above, I know that some of my songs have been pulled completely from the store, with no replacement. So they'll forever remain Protected AAC 128kbps.
As I said the other day, I've had limited luck letting iTMS support know about my difficulty upgrading some songs, and they've sent me a few free song codes to help out. Definitely a nice gesture that they didn't have to do, but it wasn't enough to upgrade all of the songs that fell into the above categories.
As for the whining about paying to upgrade, reallynotnick, Chupa Chupa, and others are right. You originally,
willingly paid for a product with certain characteristics: 128kbps bitrate and DRM. You got what you paid for. There is now a
higher quality version being sold: call it song 2.0. You can't possibly expect to get the new and improved product for free, even if it's being sold for the same price as the original. Just like software upgrades, cassette tape to CD, VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray, last year's car model to this year's, etc. Digital music is no different. A small upgrade price is frankly a nice gesture and not even required.
One could definitely argue that the previous all-at-once policy was pure greed - I wasn't too thrilled with it myself. But as I said to start this post, it's great news that they finally saw the light. The market worked.
would see that I originally had the explicit version. Why on earth would I want the clean version in an iTunes + format?
