Apple today announced a deal in place with the major record labels to begin selling all tracks on the Apple Music Store without the FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection that had been in place since the store opened. The FairPlay DRM kept buyers from playing their songs on devices that were not iPods, or computers that were not running iTunes and allowed to play those tracks. By the end of Q1 of 2009, Apple expects to have 10 million songs available on the iTunes store, all unprotected by DRM constraints.
In addition to this new freedom, some songs will see a steep drop in price. Older and less popular tunes will now cost as little as $0.69, while new iTunes Plus releases will see a similar increase to $1.29. Still, with the lack of DRM and the improved sound quality offered by the iTunes Plus tracks, which are encoded at a higher bitrate, this is a deal we'll gladly accept.
Finally, the icing on the iTunes cake was the announcement that iTunes songs will now be available for download over AT&T's 3G wireless network. While iPhone 3G owners could previously buy songs if they were using a Wi-Fi network, the iTunes Music Store on Apple iPhones will now allow users to make purchases and download music.
We've already tried this feature on our iPhone 3G, and were stopped in the process of buying Kanye's new album by a message that told us our download exceeded 10MB, so we would have to use Wi-Fi. Oh well, it's still a good start. Interestingly, AT&T's own music download service has been stalling for months now, so Apple's offering represents a new front for the music download battle on AT&T.
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