Isn't it worth mentioning that these tracks are both higher quality and DRM free? Still too pricey for me, but it seems like you are leaving out the major bits of the announcement. I think it is a pretty important step in the right direction. Do you really not think so?
- jim 4-02-2007 8:08 pm

I just think it's hilarious that the only way it could happen was for the already bogus inflated price to go higher.

I don't mind seeming biased when the "victim" is a bloated industry that needs to rethink how art is packaged and sold.
- tom moody 4-02-2007 8:30 pm

I don't have iTunes so I don't know if they have "album rates," but assuming you bought a CD's worth of EMI songs, say 10 songs plus 2 bonus tracks, the price would be $15.48.

That's the same price as a CD for lesser, compressed files, no packaging, no physical media, and no distribution costs to speak of.

That's just nuts! I should have been more sarcastic!
- tom moody 4-02-2007 9:07 pm

So you think higher quality tracks (which equals larger file size, which equals greater distributions costs) should be cheaper? Or even the same price? And are you so okay with DRM that a major label breaking down and offering DRM free tracks is not even worth a mention? Just seems weird to me.

- jim 4-02-2007 9:26 pm

I'll be honest and not Google it, but I don't know what DRM is.

However, if they costs of packaging, physical distribution, warehousing, retail overhead, are removed, then yes, the price of the file should be far less.
- robert huffmann (guest) 4-02-2007 9:33 pm

DRM is digital rights management. Regular iTunes Music Store tracks (and Microsoft tracks and most other stores tracks) come with DRM so there is no super simple way to copy them (with Apple you have to write them out to CD and reimport, or use an illegal free program to strip the DRM if you want to copy them to more than 3 other computers.)

This is a boring debate I guess I got us into, sorry. But my point is that yes, the price is too high to begin with, but given the old price (without most of the overhead of physical media) these tracks are twice the bitrate (so twice the bandwidth overhead) so I think it's reasonable that they cost a little more. It's certainly not some scam. You get a lot more value, for a little more cost. Plus, I think we all hate DRM, so this really can be seen as the first break in the dike that might bring the whole wall down. I just think that is worth a mention.

But, again, I agree that the base price is too high. Unfortunately they've sold over 1 billion songs so obviously a lot of people disagree with us!
- jim 4-02-2007 9:39 pm

Man, we are not communicating.
If I want 12 Beatles songs I can buy a "best of" CD through Amazon.
I get .wav files that I can rip or record as .wavs and rip to any compression I want. No DRM.
Plus I get packaging, graphics, info, and a professionally mastered disc that stores the files.
And the CD is already vastly inflated since prices never came down after the '80s when plant capacity expanded.
If I just get 12 mp3s and none of the above it shouldn't be for the same price--it should be for a small fraction of the (ripoff) price I pay amazon because there's no overhead.
The only reason the newly announced scheme seems revolutionary is they convinced enough people to accept the 99 cent scheme.
- tom moody 4-02-2007 9:42 pm

I agree with you on the points you mention above.
- jim 4-02-2007 9:43 pm

I wrote that before reading your last post, Jim.

- tom moody 4-02-2007 9:44 pm

Okay, last thing, I promise.

For me, personally, I don't find owning the actual CD to be a benefit. For me it just means that I have to go through the effort to rip it and then make sure all the ID3 tags are correct! This can be a huge pain. For me, well ripped, properly tagged digital tracks (with the high quality artwork included in digital form) are worth more than the physical media. I just don't have space for all the CDs that I possess in digital form. I'd need a bigger apartment. So I think the value of these things can vary from person to person. It's not obvious that the CD should be worth more. At least to me.
- jim 4-02-2007 9:47 pm

I'm just using the CD as a yardstick for price. You're suggesting we measure the convenience value of the mp3's *immateriality* to balance out all the things I mentioned you're not getting with your download.

That's valid. I'd still start with a CD and weigh all these factors to end up with a drastically lower price, not an equivalent one.
- tom moody 4-02-2007 9:56 pm

im stumbling on the cost increase too. it implies the need to upgrade and spend more on maintaining an up to date library. these files are still sub-cd quality. shall we expect more costly incremental increases in file quality and ipod (etc) music players capacity/capability ?


- bill 4-02-2007 10:36 pm

Okay, I know I said last comment before, but now I've actually read the articles more closely...

Higher quality, non-DRM'd album prices will be the same as before. Here's the EMI press release:

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.

heres apples hot news.


- bill 4-02-2007 10:47 pm

What was the album price before?
- tom moody 4-02-2007 10:48 pm

Also I don't want AACs, I want mp3s or oggs!
- tom moody 4-02-2007 10:50 pm

why would you want mp3 over aac? Or was that a joke?
- jim 4-02-2007 10:54 pm

Semi-joke. Do you convert aacs to mp3s? I assume all players play aacs like mp3s but I just don't much like the idea of a brand-specific file (this includes mpga or wma).
- tom moody 4-02-2007 11:22 pm

aac is an open, international standard, just like MPEG layer III (aka mp3). Much of the original work was done at Fraunhofer, a state sponsored research institute in Germany.

It's been followed up by AAC+, AAC+V2, etc. This family of codecs are a vast improvement over mp3, which was state of the art almost twenty years ago.
- mark 4-02-2007 11:41 pm

Then why haven't I heard of it? Just kidding, thanks.
- tom moody 4-03-2007 12:07 am

For me, the preference for purchases are (in order) Rasputin's used bins, Rasputin's new bins, Amazon. I will never buy DRM'ed music. I might buy compressed music, but it's got to be cheaper than the current prices.

IMHO, AAC at 256kbps is not bad at all. If that format was available (non-DRM'ed) at half the price of a CD, I'd consider it for at least some tunes. Until then, my dollars are voting for atoms+bits rather than just bits.
- mark 4-03-2007 12:07 am

Oh, and non-DRM'ed music for sale on-line is a move in the right direction. Yay!

I wonder if it's uniquely watermarked based on iTunes account information so they can tell who's sharing? Just a thought.
- mark 4-03-2007 12:12 am

>>I wonder if it's uniquely watermarked based on iTunes account information so they can tell who's sharing? Just a thought.


*eerie organ notes*

OK, so how soon do I have to convert my 200 plus and counting songs to aac to avoid looking like an old dude musician with a website featuring all his music in realaudio streaming format?
- tom moody 4-03-2007 1:17 am

Yay, atoms! (Although I'm drifting away into bits.)

>>I wonder if it's uniquely watermarked based on iTunes account information so they can tell who's sharing? Just a thought.


*eerie organ notes*

OK, so how soon do I have to convert my 200 plus and counting songs from mp3 to aac to avoid looking like an old dude musician with a website featuring all his music in realaudio streaming format?
- tom moody 4-03-2007 1:18 am

*This just in:*

A journalist from the NEW YORK TIMES found the "world wide web" to be full of music that is not copy protected, offered in backward-compatible formats that every cellphone and Wii console can play, from totally fresh artists!

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the "WWW" (sometimes "world wide web" is abbreviated as "WWW"), just announced an awesome cooperation with all major musicians all over the world: They will now finally make the move and, quote, "show Apple the teeth"! "We can deliver a better product at a more reasonable price", Berners-Lee goes on, "i believe we will soon be able to break into Apple's market share. We are even compatible with their music file replaying device."

This large music library is easy to access: Just install a special software on your system that is called "Web Browser" and instantly access the music. You might also need an "Operating System" that usually comes with software to replay the music files obtained through the WWW-Service. "This is the hard part", admits Berners-Lee, "you indeed have to be a bit knowledgeable of technology to handle our revolutionary offer. Apple clearly has an advantage there. But we are working on this problem and already made great progress. For example, for some users, if they turn on their computer they might already find most of the tools needed to enjoy the WWW music store."

Music fans and Apple's Steve Jobs seem not impressed. "Naa, again something new!", complains Jeremy, music fan from Chicago. "I mean, iTunes is so convenient. You just have to download some hundred megabytes of software (it doesn't come on a CD with the iPod), install that stuff (together with Quicktime, that's the funny litte Q letter that suddenly tries to take care of all your files) and boom, there you go, immediately the possibility of moving files from one storage medium to another appeared! Can't imagine this WW thing being better than that, especially if it doesn't cost anything!" Steve Jobs is quoted saying: "Apple already fully embraces the WWW. All of our computers are shipped 'blog ready'. That's what the WWW is for."
- drx (guest) 4-03-2007 1:25 am

Thank you for this report. I have been using the Berners-Lee system myself now for several years, as a consumer and a producer, and find it very satisfactory.
- tom moody 4-03-2007 1:37 am

fuck AAC. OGG or FLAC.

"...a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs. [4] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement.

AAC requires a patent license, and thus uses proprietary technology. But contrary to popular belief, it is not the property of a single company, having been developed in a standards-making organization."
- paul (guest) 4-03-2007 2:54 am

I knew there was something wrong with AACs. Must have read something and vaguely remembered it.
- tom moody 4-03-2007 7:12 pm

I see your point. A transparent, widely supported technology should be avoided, despite the fact that free encoders and decoders are readily available, because somehow, somewhere along the way people might receive monetary compensation for their creative ideas.

Sarcasm aside, I will admit I'm biased. I invent, sell and buy multimedia IP.
- mark 4-03-2007 7:16 pm

"somehow, somewhere along the way people might receive monetary compensation"
I would add that eventuality to "death" and "taxes."
As I recall, the humble GIF was under a cloud until fairly recently.
- tom moody 4-03-2007 7:30 pm

The patent system is pretty fucked up. The biggest problem, from my perspective, is that people aren't supposed to be able to patent things that are "obvious". Very little seems to be obvious to the patent examiners.

Another big problem is the ability for companies to torpedo something once it's become a standard by demanding outrageous royalties. Seems to me this should be handled more like a trademark. If you don't speak out early, you lose.

The standards bodies are getting more and more savvy to the issues around patents. Technology WILL NOT get into an MPEG standard without companies' agreeing upfront to reasonable, non-discriminatory licensing.

While standards produced bodies like MPEG have some strings attached (e.g. patent pools), often the alternative is closed codecs, like WM9. In the battle between MPEG-4 AVC and WM9, it was real close. AVC just barely won. It may seem inevitable in retrospect, but it wasn't at all. No "license free" contender was in sight, simply because many of the key compression enhancements in AVC were the result of significant R&D investment.

A few years down the road, a "license free" video standard may be viable. (It's questionable whether or not AVS steps on patents, and it's quite simply not as good.) By some accounts Ogg Vorbis is a contender in the audio compression space (although high quality 64-96 kbps 5.1 surround will be the new target to hit). But please don't lump AAC in with WMA, WM9, GIF and the like.
- mark 4-03-2007 10:17 pm

To put some numbers around "reasonable", here are the patent licensing fees for the AAC patent pool (from Via Licensing). SW licensing is a separate issue, but since it's an open standard, people are free to write their own, use GPL, license an implementation from Coding Technologies, etc., etc.

Volume (per channel/quarterly reset)	Consumer Decoder Channels	Consumer Codec Channels	Professional Decoder Channels	Professional Encoder Channels
Flat Rate	n/a	n/a	$1.80	$18.00
1 to 100,000	$0.45	$0.90	n/a	n/a
100,001 to 500,000	$0.35	$0.80	n/a	n/a
500,001 to 1,000,000	$0.25	$0.70	n/a	n/a
1,000,001 to 5,000,000	$0.20	$0.65	n/a	n/a
5,000,001 to 10,000,000	$0.15	$0.65	n/a	n/a
10,000,001 or more	$0.10	$0.65	n/a	n/a

- mark 4-03-2007 10:38 pm