The LA Times says that the pricing structure will be based on popularity, "true to supply-and-demand economics." (Except that you know, there is limitless supply here, but whatever.) New artists will be the ones most likely to have their tracks sold for 69 cents a pop. Even classics that are perpetually loved by the masses—the LA Times mentions "Born in the USA" could go for $1.29.

99 cents is such a psychologically satisfying price—it's not even a dollar, as this really annoying Coke radio ad I kept hearing over the weekend pounded into my brain. It doesn't take a genius to see that $1.29 tracks are going to sell way less than they would if they were 99 cents, because the purchase officially moves from impulse level to the lower rung of "well, lemme think about it" territory. [LA Times - Thanks Ray!]

That's right. They won't let you choose which stuff you can upgrade. This has been reported already, at least by this guy—and I suppose it's not new news given the fact that they've done upgrades since EMI went DRM-free a while back—but the scope is much greater now that all the labels are on board. After returning from a week of Macworld and CES to the comforts of home, the impact of this has hit me, like the baseball bat I took on the cheekbone back in 1993.

You're snickering. Not about the baseball bat (I hope), but about the whole spending-money-on-iTunes thing. Yep, I am a recovered iTunes DRM-music-buying addict. I still pay for music, but now Amazon is the legitimate source of all my thankfully DRM-free impulse buys.

Last Tuesday's announcement that iTunes would go DRM-free was good news in several ways: Not only might iTunes win me back as a customer, but I also would be able to upgrade the best stuff I bought over the years, so I could have it in high quality, playable not just on my Apple (TM) products, but also on Sonos or BlackBerry or any other fun music-savvy device that comes in and out of my house.

So I clicked "Upgrade To iTunes Plus" and I got a gun to my face saying "$250 or else."

Seriously, they want $250—actually, they want $250.06 but what's a few pennies between lifelong friends?—to upgrade the 1,000+ songs I've bought over the years. That would mean that all those albums I paid $9.99 for would actually cost me $13 in the end. That's the same amount the damn CD would have cost me in the first place, if I still bought those museum pieces. And the CD would have given me the option to rip at higher quality than 256Kbps, and would come with liner notes telling me who played that sick drum solo on Track 12, to boot.

The clincher was this: When I went to click on just the albums I really wanted to update, the "upgrade" price was... full price. WHA?? I clicked on the FAQ, and this is what I saw:

I remembered a similar bulk upgrade offer before, when it was just EMI's content, but as you can imagine, the price they wanted for that was less scary. I must've paid it (probably under the influence of alcohol). I haven't caved this time—not yet at least. I'd be faced with having to explain a $250 iTunes charge to the wife without getting any new music, movies or music videos to show for it. She's a cool person and all, but I wouldn't escape that conversation without some kind of half-accusatory, half-pitying "Oh babe."

Do you see what you're doing to me and to my family, iTunes? I guess you do: You are only the monster the music industry has made you for screwing with their decades-long con. Amazon definitely got the better deal, most likely for appearing harmless—no doubt their inevitable contract renegotiation will be a bitch and a half.

And to those of you out there who steal music instead of buying it, well, frankly, I can totally see why. [iTunes What's New]

Besides the fact it's nothing new (and iTunes ain't the only place that does it), it shouldn't really be an issue. The legit point of DRM-free tracks is that you can use them on any device you want without any retarded roadblocks, and easily share it with some friends, and it's not like you care if they've got your email address right? Right? [Crave via Slashdot]

So what do you think? Personally, I don't see it as a very big deal. I mean, the DRM-free tracks are meant to allow people to use the tracks how they see fit according to fair use, and having your name in the files won't affect that. Furthermore, anyone who's going to pirate music isn't going to do so by downloading AAC files from iTunes to spread around, they're going to rip MP3s from a CD. I think the iTunes Plus program is pretty damned awesome, and this whole ruckus is just an example of people never being satisfied no matter what they're given. Can't you people be happy for once?

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Meanwhile, Warner Music, which has an agreement with YouTube, announced that it would begin to share music videos for free on ad-supported sites based around artist. OK, so like, how is that different than the promotional artist sites that already have videos? Oh, right, ads. Thanks WMG!!

You know all of this business wheeling and dealing aside, I'm just glad we might actually be entering a new golden age of the music video. I mean, nothing will ever touch A-Ha's "Take On Me" or Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity," but do I want my new music rendererd visually for better receptivity into the assorted memory banks of my brain? Yes, I do. – Wilson Rothman

YouTube signs broad licensing pact with EMI [Reuters]
Warner to put ad-supported video archive online [Reuters]

Not to spoil anything, but Wilson and his two test partners could hear a difference between 128kbps and 256kbps on his medium to medium-high end speaker setup. However, if you've got a $50 speaker setup running from off your motherboard's sound card, you probably won't. – Jason Chen

Where's the Other Half of Your Music File? [NYTimes]

Called iTunes Plus, it's available now, and all it asks is an extra 30 cents per song ($1.29 for each instead of $.99 for iTunes songs). Is there a big difference in sound quality between those 128kbps iTunes files and these 256kbps iTunes Plus songs? Let's dig into iTunes Plus, grab a few files and compare them to the old-style locked-up tunes.

To access the iTunes Plus songs, a limited selection with only EMI artists thus far, first you must upgrade your iTiunes software to version 7.2.0.34. Then, you simply tell iTunes you'd like for it to offer you iTunes Plus songs whenever they're available.

Then it offers (for thirty cents each) to convert any 128kbps tunes you already have into iTunes Plus files, if they are available that way. This was easier said than done. Our collection here only had five songs that qualified. We're still not sure why, but we got an error message on four of the five songs. Could it be that we had already stripped the DRM from those songs? Could be, could be.

We downloaded two more iTunes songs to see what would happen, and the same thing occurred. Errors (see graphic below). Throughout the day, we experienced numerous timeouts with the new iTunes Plus store, a situation we're thinking (hoping) is because of the intense interest in unchaining libraries of music held captive for the past few years. By the way, don't get too eager to spread those songs around, because there's still user info embedded in each "DRM free" file you download.

Moving beyond those little hitches, after lots of attempts we found a few songs we wanted to download in the iTunes Plus section, snagged those and then painstakingly changed our preferences to download the 128kbps versions of those same songs for comparison. Among a few others, we listened to Cold Play, and some complicated Salsa by Juan Luis Guerra to compare the quality of one compression rate to the other.

Comparing these two bitrates was tough, even when using a pair of state-of-the-art Ultrasone headphones. In our decidedly unscientific comparison, we listened to all the tunes at both bitrates in A/B comparisons with those phones, with iPod stock earbuds, on our kick-ass car stereo, and on our reference Dolby 5.1 home theater system.

The difference between the two types was subtle. Listening to a variety of songs, each encoded in 128kbps and then 256kbps, showed very little difference between the two, if any. Frankly, neither sounded as good as it could have to these trained musician's ears, but to discern the difference would take a professionally-trained audiophile's ears and perhaps a permanently-embedded oscilloscope in the brain.

Anyone who swears he or she can tell the difference, I would say have someone give you a double blind test and see if you can correctly guess more than 50% of the examples. Sure, you'll be able to spot a 64kbps file, but comparing 128 to 256 is more challenging. Good luck, golden ears. Even if you can tell the slight difference, it's not a big enough diff to start celebrating anything. Suffice to say that both sounded good enough to enjoy the music, if that's what you're after. For high fidelity, I'd suggest you abandon compression altogether and listen to vinyl. Better yet, go to a live concert.

The real jewel here is the lack of DRM, letting you play your music wherever you want. Hallelujah! Play them on a PSP, or on any music player that can handle AAC-encoded files. Play them here or there, play them anywhere. You can even abandon iTunes altogether if you want, well, with those limited songs that are available thus far, that is. The point is, for an extra $.30, you now own the rights to listen to your music wherever you want. And that is a joy that we should have had all along. Let's hope this is just the beginning. – Charlie White

Turns out that your account information is embedded in every DRM-free AAC file you download, so if your purchased songs somehow get distributed all around the Internets, they'll be able to easily see who the culprit was. But you wanted DRM-free tunes so you could play them on multiple devices and copy them for personal use, not for piracy, right? Right guys? –Adam Frucci

TUAW Tip: Don't Torrent That Song... [TUAW]

Although there aren't any DRM-free songs on there now at midnight, Apple will probably make an official announcement in the morning and release the tracks then. One good note from the help file shows that if you've already purchased songs from the iTunes store, you can upgrade those to the respective DRM-free version as well. Stay tuned later today for more info. – Jason Chen

Apple Releases iTunes 7.2, Launches iTunes Plus (DRM Free) [MacRumors]