14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has officially announced the price reduction for iTunes Plus songs and the addition of independent labels. While it is good to have official confirmation of this particular rumor, the move has created some confusion, as expected.
With the expansion of the iTunes Plus catalogue, customers now have over two million DRM free tracks to choose from, both at the 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality and the new price of just 99 cents. With these latest additions, iTunes now has the largest DRM free catalogue in the world.
"iTunes Plus has been incredibly popular with our customers and now we're making it available at an even more affordable price," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes, in the press release. "We're adding over two million tracks from key independent labels in addition to EMI's digital catalog and look forward to even more labels and artists making their music available on iTunes Plus."
While the new price is definitely a boon for music lovers, this change has given birth to some confusion. The biggest question is that of upgrading your music, an option that previously let you update purchased songs with DRM to the higher quality, DRM free version. Now that iTunes Plus songs sell for the same amount, people were expecting to see this option becoming free, but Apple still charges the usual $0.30 per track. People who previously bought tracks for $0.99 will now have to pay extra just to have them updated to the quality that new customers get for paying the same amount. Considering that the upgrade fee is almost a third of the cost of the track, some customers are less than happy about this. So far there has not been as big a reaction as there was when the company lowered the price of the iPhone, but that could very well change in the days ahead. On the other hand, iTunes Plus music has been available for quite a long time now and everybody that ever bought music from the iTunes store had to know that sound quality would be improved at some point down the road.