$0.30 to save you the time of the old burn-and-rip way around Apple's DRM. No thanks.

Do what I do. NEVER BUY DRMed MUSIC!

And that's why DRM makes people want to pirate music instead of paying for it. If they charged $5 per DRM free album they would likely make more money. I don't see why a digital copy of an album is only a few bucks cheaper. The record company isnt paying to print album art, paying to make a physical CD, paying for distribution, etc. It should be half the price!

iTunes

There's your problem right there.

@pegr:
The tipster didn't buy DRMed music. He bought MP3s from Amazon and iTunes attempted to upgrade that DRM free music to their own, at a price.

I have a similar issue, when I look at the iTunes Plus upgrade page it shows only one album, Barenaked Ladies Everything to Everyone. This is a bit concerning to me as I ripped that from my own CD I purchased years ago, on a different machine and not using iTunes.

@humphrmi: I'm actually having to do this for my dad. I handed them my old iPod and he can't play any of my account's tracks as all my authorizations are used up.

Well, it's either a bug and it thinks some stuff is .m4p when it's really not...

Or, they are trying to sell you iTunes Plus because of the 256k AAC quality, not the lack of DRM.

It's possible iTunes offers upgrades on lower-bitrate rips and purchases from other sources.

@jklug80: But they do owe payments on their mortgage with Satan, and you KNOW bad things happen when you're late on those payments.

@Sol Young:

1. Buy DRM-free tracks at Amazon.
2. ????
3. Profit.

Apparently step 2 involves iTunes mucking with your library.

You seem to forget that it just doesn't remove the DRM, you get a higher bitrate also. I'm kinda suspicious about this claim, as the way Apple determines if you need an upgrade is by what you have purchased through your account. You will get a different list if you log on through a different account. It just doesn't seem possible that this would happen. Obviously a bad glitch.

@phate: Think of it as a crossgrade.

I haven't had this problem, so I'm going to come down on the side of a technical glitch. But it surprises me because I was convinced they used your account purchase history. I was impressed that it correctly identified music from which I had scrubbed the DRM and also offered to upgrade purchased that I had already archived.

This is why I don't buy songs from iTunes. I usually just go straight to Amazon.

I use Microsoft's Media Center to play music. Each and every song, including those I've ripped myself and those I've bought from Amazon, include the option to purchase the song. Why would I buy what I already own? It makes no sense.

@Sol Young: He also had purchased DRMed music from iTunes.

That's dumb.

I decided after mistakenly buying some tracks I can't convert that I'm never purchasing music from iTunes again. It's Amazon all the way. I'll keep iTunes on the machine to sync my iPod but that's it.

This is a lie. iTunes Plus upgrades use data from your account purchase history. It does not look at what is already in your library at all. If you're seeing iTunes Plus upgrades on songs you ripped from CD or purchased from Amazon, it's because you purchased them on iTunes as well.

@humphrmi: The non-drm tracks are higher quality then burn-rerip.

@vliam: Slashdot memes don't belong here on the Consumerist. They're not funny at Slashdot and they're just annoying here.

@silver-bolt: Yeah, I've heard that argument. My 45 year old ears can't tell the difference. {shrug}

@S-Meow P-Meow: It's not a slashdot meme. It's a 4chan meme, like all memes. When someone sees something on TV they want to imitate, they go to 4chan first, because it is the ***hole of the internet.

@S-Meow P-Meow:

Thank you for saying what I was thinking. The other crap I'd like to see die is the lolcatz stuff. Ugh!

@jklug80: The costs you are talking about make up a fraction of a CD. As a matter of fact, and if you scour the web (I'm too lazy to do it at the moment), you will find out that the physical album (including costs to develop liner notes, album covers, etc) is like $1-2 max of a CD cost. Most of the money is for the record studios to recover money lost on other albums that don't sell well, recording studios (which cost $$$), engineers (which make the album sound nice [aka the ones who use auto-tune] and also cost $$$), the band itself, managers, record company staff, licensing (since many artists nowadays 'borrow' stuff), etc.

@HogwartsAlum: You can convert them - there's several pieces of software that will basically emulate a cd drive and allow you to "burn" them to your drive.

Its a hassle, but its better then wasting CD media.

@kewlfocus: Although the Amazon tracks are also sold at 256k, so it wouldn't be a bitrate upgrade either.

Oops, Apple.
Please fix.

xxxooo,
Your fans.

@dmc:

This is correct it gos by your history. you don't even need to the original file to quote upgrade. This is handy if you lost a file for some reason. OP prob bought song twice (once at each store) i have done this at least twice..

@humphrmi: And, a small correction:
"...around the record label-mandated DRM."
:)

@S-Meow P-Meow: Especially five-year-old memes.

What's an iTunes?

@dmc: This is worth investigating, since it changes the scope of the tracks affected, dramatically. If so, perhaps update the article?
It makes more sense from a programming perspective, as well.

At any rate, here's what Apple.com has to say about it, which supports what you said:

It's also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don't have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30¢ per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60¢ and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)

@Trai_Dep: @SiddhimaAmythaon: It's just amazing how people can make claims about something they have never experienced themselves.

Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't mean its impossable to happen to anyone.

I love my ipod and iphone but not so much that I ignore reason and facts. This is how the term fanboy was coined.

You already paid for the tracks. Why pay for it again?

There are a handful of software programs out there that will strip the DRM from music purchased through itunes.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Think different. LOL.

What's worse, I noticed the other day that iTunes added DRM to all of my music, half of which I ripped from CDs. The tracks would no longer play in any player besides iTunes or my iPod. I could find no clear way to return those files to their original, DRM-free format. I resolved then and there to quit being lazy and just strip all the DRM once and for all, even from my iTunes-purchased tracks, legal or not. It took me a while to find a scalable solution, but I'm DRM-free now (again).

I'm through defending iTunes and Apple. That was crossing the line.

@Trai_Dep: Yeah, that opens an interesting question, doesn't it? So the price to circumvent the record label mandate is $0.30 per song. What then are we exactly paying them for? Offsetting losses from all those nasty pirates? Illogical, because (if he really wanted to) of course a pirate could buy the non-DRM music and then distribute it further. But he won't, because he knows he can download that music for free somewhere else. $0.30 Makes no sense in that context.

Nope, they've got to assume that everyone who buys the non-DRM music are solid, upstanding citizens who would never consider pirating music or distributing their songs to other pirates. So what, then, are the non-pirate music listeners paying $0.30 for?

I say it's just a fee to have Apple burn-and-rip the music for me, on some high-quality media of some sort. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. ;-)

@chrisjames: iTunes doesn't add DRM to ripped music, but it does import cds as AAC by default. The resulting files don't have DRM but if your player doesn't support AAC then it can't play it. What players did you try that wouldn't work?

I never understood how people were convinced to pay for DRM-laced, low-bitrate songs from a fairly limited library. And now Apple is getting away with charging for an upgrade that should have been standard? Marketing and fervent brand loyalty do a fantastic job of keeping people from seriously looking into the products they purchase.

This remins me of the Wii and its Wii-motion. Something that should have already been present in the controllers but will now be a costly bulky addon to every one. Or perhaps the Wii re-releases of Gamecube games to simply have Wii controls.

was looking at getting an iPod touch in the future, but if this (and the charging for firmware updates) is how the company handles the software, no thanks. Don't want iTunes anywhere near my hard drive.

@chrisjames: This is really weird and the first instance i've heard of something like this happening. I can't even think of a technical way this happened. I'm guessing you're missing some important piece of the puzzle somewhere.

This is a great racket. Charge people twice for the same song.

If Apple was really looking out for it's customers, it'll let you re-download the songs without DRM. Why scan my hard drive when they have a perfect record of what I purchased from them?

Wow, there's a lot of misconceptions here.

AAC is not a protected format. Ripping songs to AAC (The default iTunes preference) won't add DRM, but your other media players (Be it software or hardware) may not support AAC. And if you run a computer to hide extensions, you may never even see what the file is.

And the iT+ gets the info from your account history. It wouldn't upgrade songs you DIDN'T buy or else they could sell a song to you for 30 cents by adding it to your library. Possibly you downloaded it long ago (Maybe as a free download of the week?)

Either way, it doesn't work like that, from scanning your list. Plenty of my Amazon songs and imported MP3s don't pop up in the iTunes upgrade list. Only 5 albums I actually got off of iTunes.

And Apple can't let you re-download the song for free. They would if they could, like with their app store, but the music industry contract is what's holding that back. I'm really curious as to what happened on your machine, because the iTunes store is a completely separate entity from your library. I can see what songs are upgradable when I'm on my work PC with different songs.

@S-Meow P-Meow: Slashdot? it's from an old South Park episode with the underpants gnomes.

@chrisjames:

How did you determine that DRM was added to the files you ripped from a CD? As John Tobe said, perhaps you ripped the files in AAC format.

It's not fair to fault Apple/iTunes without due cause. I'm not convinced (because I've never seem evidence of it anywhere else) that iTunes places DRM on encoded music. It's simply not what iTunes does. Only the songs purchased from the iTunes Store are protected by DRM.

I hope no one else believes your claim without additional support from you... such as how you determined the encoded files were DRM-ed.

@dmc: Yeah, I'm almost completely sure that is how it works. Apple's agreement with the labels doesn't allow them to "upgrade" random songs in your library - it allows them to upgrade tracks you've already purchased.

@ humphrmi:

It's hard to tell the difference unless you have a higher audio playback device. If you're listening to music using the free earphones from apple, for example, it'll be very hard to differentiate bit rates.

I bought an earbud that costs $500 retail a year ago, and the earbud's ability to reproduce sound is such that I don't listen to ANY music with a bit rate ("quality") below 192 kilo bytes/second.

@smythe: Err, where did that come from? Note the "please fix" part? As in, mistakes were made?
The difference being, of course, that I'm fairly confident that Apple will fix their mistakes and even admit they boo-booed.
Unlike, say, Dell, who will only laugh maniacally, tell you that you should have bought from Dell Business with a Gold Support Plan, then for good measure, crush baby chicks under hobnailed boots, then quaff the gory viscera from a It Is Good To Be King-logoed mug.

All this aside, it might be that Apple only looks at the songs from an incomplete CD that you've purchased from iTunes that are the old format, which isn't so alarming.

@cc82: It's kind of like MediaMonkey, but not quite as good.

@rorschachex: Well, that's not entirely true. If you've ever read a recording contract you'd know that this argument only goes so far. True, if albums don't sell they have to make up for the money lost on recording, marketing and management; however, they also sneak in all kinds of clauses whereby the money invested on the part of the record company is more like a loan which must be repaid in full before any money flows to the artists (other than the initial advance and anything else negotiated). All in all, the contracts are, in my opinion, one sided and quite unfair to the artists. They lose copyright interest in the recordings in return for an advance and, barring stellar sales, nothing more. It seems to me that it is the bloated industry that results in low profitability rather than the threat of piracy. In the absence of entrenched industry practices, which are no longer efficient or effective, the music industry could offer their product more inexpensively to both in terms of cost to themselves and to customers.

I have been making the argument of pricepoint adjustments for almost a decade. While many beat their chest and claim that you can't compete with free I don't think that the playing field is that black and white. Consumers are capable of paying for their music; however, the market has never been allowed, legally, to adjust to match consumer expectations. For those of you who recall the hayday of allofmp3.com, that was clear evidence that lowering the pricepoint of music created an incentive to pay for music. Clearly, it was not legitimate in the eyes of the Industry and WIPO; however, it does show that individuals would consider the transaction cost of time and efforts involved with piracy when faced with what they consider reasonably priced music.

Alternative production means also could stem many of the problems that are cited in order to artificially inflate music prices. Sellaband.com, for example front loads the financing of albums. If the album doesn't pre-sell enough shares/generate enough interest then it doesn't get made. That means no concern about losses on albums that don't sell, thereby bringing down the average cost of music.

The solution is not to sit back and accept things as they are. We are all capable and intelligent people. If we want the world to change we have to start thinking and remaking it as we think it should be.

@M3wThr33: The mis-conceptions are easy to figure because Apple uses AAC and most of the time no one could play the files on anything other than their iPod. Even if there is no DRM, it makes no difference; you can't play the file on anything other than iTunes/iPod and a few esoteric players. People have associated AAC with DRM even if you shout real loud that it doesn't have DRM, people will still associate AAC with DRM; forever. mp3 will not support DRM, so everyone knows that MP3 format is better: you never have to worry about DRM. Me included. I will not encode my music in any format other than mp3, even if there is a "better" format because mp3s work on all players and are good enough.

@silver-bolt: Why would that be the case? Unless the non-drm tracks themselves are higher quality than the drm tracks, then there shouldn't be a loss of quality burning the drm tracks to cd then reripping.