Yesterday’s rather boring Macworld Expo did have one good glimmer of freedom: iTunes will no longer protect its music with the awful DRM that I hate. Digital Rights Management was a golden goose egg that arrived too late and under-cooked. I was pleased with the announcement that iTunes music would finally belong to those that bought it because that’s the way it was always supposed to be: Only the container changed. When I jumped into the iTunes store to upgrade my 4,000 song strong iTunes-purchased library, I was met with this offer to upgrade: $270.84USD for 1,304 total songs. I clicked that “BUY” button and the download parade began. Almost.
If you have a lot of songs to upgrade, you’ll get this iTunes notice about your upgrade being processed.
After waiting an anxious 10 minutes, I received this email from Apple that my upgraded songs were ready for downloading.
When I clicked on the download link in the email, my MacBook Pro popped up this action window asking me how I wanted to handle that download link.
I clicked “OK” and iTunes was launched and the downloading began!
If you’ve ever upgraded your iTunes library before, you’ve likely seen this warning about dumping your old songs in the trash.
Click “OK” and move ahead.
My initial 1,304 song download was broken up into 250 song chunks.
I had to keep checking the store for items to download after each 250 song parcel was delivered and that process took a few hours to complete.
Comcast Cable did a fine job delivering 250 songs in 20 minutes or so.
One time 463 songs were smashed into my download queue!
That big load took about 45 minutes to complete.
I’ve been pulling down new purchases in parcels ranging from 12 to 57 songs each time. As the days stretch into weeks and months, even more songs will be added to the iTunes library you can then choose to upgrade.
I wonder if iTunes will kill the likes of LaLa? I hope not, because I now have over 1,500 new DRM-free iTunes songs that were uploaded to my LaLa account since last night.
Can a service like LaLa afford to stay in business with iTunes users uploading their massive libraries of recently “released” songs for free streaming on the LaLa service?
I doubt it.
Good on them! Some people say that it’s rubbish that they are charging to give people what they should have given them the first time around.
I’m one of those protesters, Gordon! That’s absolutely right, too. We are being charged twice for the same content. Amazon is DRM-free and so is LaLa, so Apple was forced by the changing circumstance to get with the program and I’m so glad they finally did.