Apple’s iTunes Plus store just went live today and features (or will feature as I have not checked myself yet) many songs so sale that are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM). These “plus” track are also encoded at a higher bit rate which may translate into higher quality, though in all honesty, most people won’t be able to hear the difference. And while these tracks should now play on any player capable of playing AAC encoded music, there’s quite a ruckus on Digg right now because the tracks have the buyer’s account info encoded in the track. That means that if someone chooses to break the law by giving away the tracks via filesharing programs or other means, they can be tracked down and perhaps held accountable.
I think though, that many are really missing the big story here. I think that the stripping of the DRM is something that Apple has wanted for a long time and the record companies are starting to allow this in order to make a little more money (DRM-less tracks cost $1.29 vs $0.99 with), and to, they hope, loosen Apple’s grip on the legal digital music market. So why oh why would Apple agree to this, especially since they make their money by selling iPods, not the music? I think that they understand that in the near term at least, they’ll still be able to sell plenty of iPods because the iPod-iTMS combo is easy to use, easier than any current competitor. In the long term though, I think they want to increase the popularity of AAC versus MP3 for digital music.
Right now, all of the competing digital music players play MP3 encoded music tracks, but only a subset of these play AAC. DRM free iTunes tracks in the AAC format by default should be incentive enough for all music players to adopt AAC as a supported format. But hold on, why can’t people just transcode their AACs to MP3s? First, most people don’t know how to do that and really can’t be bothered to, and secondly, those who know how also know that transcoding from one lossy format to another lossy format results in a loss of sound quality, sound quality you just paid an extra $0.30 to get! So if Apple is able to maintain its lead in digital music players, it is inevitable that AAC popularity will rise and could someday surpass MP3. Not only that, iTMS seems likely to become the digital music store of choice for all since writing support to transfer DRM free AAC files from an iTunes library is easier to do than building a complete competing digital music store. I guess that means it’s Apple FTW!
