Today Apple launched “iTunes Plus” - iTunes Store music that’s not protected by DRM. About a month ago, Apple and EMI announced that they were going to do this, and today it’s finally arrived and we can now see what form it takes.

I think this is a particularly bold experiment by Apple and EMI. It may not seem that way to the average user, but this is EMI taking a chance on consumers not pirating the hell out of their music, and this is Apple taking a chance on selling music that will play on devices other than iPods. Both are risky. Of course there’s been a lot of unprotected music sold already, but this is the first time one of the major labels has been willing to try it. And they’re not just releasing a bunch of dusty old music that no one wants to listen to. Music by Coldplay, Gorillaz, Air, Goldfrapp, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra is available - staples of EMI’s catalog - so I have to conclude that they’re sincere and they’re really putting themselves out there.

Here’s how it works:

The iTunes Store will continue to offer both protected and unprotected forms of tracks that are available unprotected. The protected form will be the traditional $0.99 price. The unprotected form will be $1.29. The unprotected form has the additional benefit of being at twice the bitrate as the protected, so it should sound a bit better and take up twice as much disk space.

You’ll see songs that are available as iTunes Plus songs identified with a “plus” sign next to the price. Also the price will be a bit higher than usual.

You have to enable iTunes Plus in order to use it. To enable it, click on your account button in the upper right corner of the iTunes Store web page in iTunes. When it asks you to login, enter your password and click on “Update Account”. Once you enable iTunes Plus, you won’t be able to buy the cheaper protected forms of songs anymore (unless that’s the only form the song is available in). I imagine that you can turn if off later if you and go back to buying the cheaper DRM-protected forms of songs if you want, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

After you enable iTunes Plus you simply use iTunes the way you normally would.

Some things you should know:

• Not all music is available in iTunes Plus format - only selected music from EMI is available unprotected. I can’t even confirm that all of EMI’s music is available unprotected at this time.
• Unprotected songs are in the AAC format, not MP3. Some people talk about AAC as if it’s proprietary to Apple, but it was developed by a group of companies in the late 90’s and Apple chose it because it had superior quality over MP3 at the same bitrate. AAC files should play on a variety of devices - particularly Sony devices; Sony helped develop AAC and has supported it on most of their hardware.
• “Unprotected” doesn’t mean you have a license to post the music you’ve bought online and give it to everyone. It means that Apple and EMI are trusting you to act appropriately with the music and are not using technical mechanisms to restrict how you use it.
• That said, they have embedded your name in the downloaded file so if you do decide to share it with everyone either find a way to scrub your name from the file or you’ll be telling everyone where it came from.
• Unprotected songs are about twice as large as the protected ones (due to the improved sound quality). If your music library is overflowing your disk already, this will make it worse.
• If you keep your music archive on a drive that’s available to other people on a network, especially an open WiFi network, you may want to give serious consideration to not sharing unprotected iTunes Store purchases. Even if you have the best intentions you’re still responsible for them if someone else grabs them and starts spreading them around. And remember - they have your name and email address in them.

Apple also allows you to upgrade your existing iTunes purchases for the difference in cost. To check this out, go to the front page of the iTunes Store, click on the “iTunes Plus” link and in the upper right hand corner you’ll see information about upgrading your library. One gotcha is that it’s all-or-nothing - there seems to be no option for upgrading individual songs. Also, if any of the songs in your library are free songs of the week, I believe you’ll still be paying to upgrade them (which doesn’t seem entirely unfair).

I’m finding myself pleased to see that the two top DRM-free albums are Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

Now that I have some juicy DRM-free iTunes Store Music, I tried it out on a couple of other devices I had handy. I was able to get it to play on my Palm TX using the latest Pocket Tunes - older versions don’t support AAC files. Real Player for the Palm Pilot doesn’t support them either. I tried to sync them over using Missing Sync’s iTunes conduit and found that it didn’t seem to copy any files over (MP3, AAC, whatever format). Oh well.

I also tried an iTunes AAC file on my Sony-Ericsson S710a cell phone and it doesn’t seem to support anything other than MP3 files.

You can convert your DRM-free iTunes Store files to other formats. First, use iTunes’ preferences to select the format (from Preferences go to Advanced and then Importing… yes, that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense but it seems to be the one place for setting iTunes’ encoder preferences). Then select “Convert Selection to…” under the Advanced menu and you should be good to go.

I’ll be very curious to see whether the ability to use iTunes Store purchases on devices other than iPods makes an dent in iPod sales. I doubt there are many iTunes Store fans who aren’t iPod fans, as well, so I suspect it won’t matter at all.

June should be a great month for Apple. Their developer’s conference is coming up soon and they’re going to spend more time on Leopard there and likely release updated MacBook Pro’s and iMac’s. They say they’re going to release an Apple TV software update later in June which will include YouTube support. The iPhone is supposed to start shipping during June. And wouldn’t it be cool if on the 40th anniversary of the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on June 2nd for the Beatles catalog to finally be available online via the iTunes Store?

[tags]ipod, itunes store, drm, apple, drm-free, aac, emi[/tags]

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