Apple Store“‘We think our customers are going to love this,’ said Steve Jobs in Apple’s press release yesterday announcing that its iTunes store would sell DRM-free versions of EMI’s music catalog. Wrong. I like it, but, please, Steve, stop doing me favors that (1) raise music prices 30% and (2) force me to take the extra steps to remove your AAC encoding,” David DeJean blogs for InformationWeek.

“You got part of it right, Steve. I definitely do not want DRM. I want the music I pay for to play anywhere, on any device. I want to exercise my legal rights to fair use and move it from format to format — from vinyl to cassette to CD to MP3 to whatever comes next,” DeJean writes. “But I definitely do not want the music I buy encoded in your AAC format, either, or locked up inside of your iTunes software. My favorite audio player software does not play AAC. My portable music player does not play AAC. I do not use iTunes to manage my music.”

DeJean writes, “If you really want to make me a loyal Apple customer, then sell me DRM-free music in an open format at a fair price. Exactly why do you think the 30% premium for DRM-free files is fair, by the way? Why should I, a solid citizen who wants to do the right thing, have to pay a penalty for my honesty?”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "dukemeiser" for the heads up.]

MacDailyNews Take: The hits just keep on coming! Seems more than one village has let loose their idiots to cover this topic in the past few days. David, perhaps if you used iTunes to manage your music, you’d realize that AAC not Apple’s closed format and that iTunes will convert DRM-free tracks to AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, your beloved, but old and inefficient MP3, and/or WAV. You are in no way locked into iTunes, beyond using its iTunes Store interface to purchase your songs. Also, if you read EMI’s press release before banging out your goofy blog post, you’d realize that the tracks are higher quality, hence the higher price, and also that complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price.

MacDailyNews Obligatory Note: EMI’s DRM-free music sold via Apple’s iTunes Store will be in Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. AAC is the successor to MP3 and is supported by iPod and also a wide variety of digital music players, including also-ran devices such as the SanDisk Sansa e200R, Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), Sony Walkman S series (and A and E series with firmware update), Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, BenQ-Siemens, Philips, Nokia Nseries and other Nokia multimedia phones, Palm OS PDAs, even the hapless Microsoft Zune, among others. More about AAC here.

MacDailyNews Note [4/4, 2:54pm EDT]: DeJean has since updated his article with the correction: When I originally posted this entry I called the AAC format “proprietary.” Almost immediately several of the commenters below and in emails called me on it. You’re all right. AAC is not Apple proprietary and I should have known better. I quickly apologized in a comment (see it somewhere below) and removed the offending misstatement from the entry. I wrote in haste, because that is the nature of blogging, and I repent at leisure.

Contacts:
David DeJean:
Tom Smith, Editor In Chief, Online:

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