That’s not sarcasm folks. Apple has taken one for the team, and stood up to the man(s).
The Apple iTunes store will be DRM-Free starting April 1st. According to Gizmodo (reporting from the Macworld 2009 expo):
The new prices will come on April 1st. iTunes Plus will initially get 8 million songs at 256kbps, with two million more coming at the end of the quarter. When the process is done, the entire iTunes Store catalog will be available DRM free.
I sure hope this isn’t an April Fools joke. That would be cruel indeed.
DRM (Digital Rights Management), is the awful invention of the music recording industry to prevent everday users from “stealing” music. Steve Jobs has previously come out and said he would get rid of DRM if he could, but the music industry won’t let him sell without it. Amazon.com has been selling DRM-Free MP3s for a while now and apparently the industry has come to the realization that not everyone is out to steal their music and has let arguably the largest online music seller also sell DRM-Free. This is great news for us users.
Don’t worry, the industry will be getting “theirs” since they will have 3 different price points at $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29 depending on how “new and hot” the song is.
This move is *almost* enough to get me to consider an iPod. Not enough to actually buy one… but at least it’s not automatically crossed off my list.