Dear Apple/EMI,
Congratulations on succesfully coming up with a way to charge us more for what should come as standard, and that we already enjoy at no extra cost on traditional CD media.

www.emigroup.com/Press/2007/press18.htm

We, your customers, already enjoy >1000 Kbps crystal audio quality without any DRM on the CDs we purchase.

I now see that starting May, the Apple iTunes store will offer DRM free songs at 256 Kbps (over the normal 128 Kbps) for an increased price of $1.30 / £0.99 over the DRM priced $0.99 / £0.79.

If it were not already inane that music purchased online comes with restrictions on how you may use it, but a regular CD does not, it would therefore seem even stranger that a DRM free track should actually cost more than its restricted brethren; especially considering that DRM is actually the cause of most of your technical support costs due to consumers being unable to use their legally purchased songs on an equal manner to CD Audio purchased content.

Therfore; should not DRM-Free music come as standard as does with Audio CD - and should therefore be cheaper because of the reduced support costs associated with DRM Free music, in addition to the lack of physical distribution required such as packaging and printing, as well as the additional competition that should occur on a free and open market where online music stores can compete on equal merits without vender lock in caused by one-device-only proprietary DRM?

You may proclaim that the additional expendature gives you "Double the Quality!" but it is only double the quality of the already low bitrate files on iTunes in comparison to super high quality lossless CD Audio. As it is, a 128 Kbps AAC file is already within the quality region of a 256 Kbps MP3 file due to better enocding technology provided with AAC, so therefore 256 Kbps AAC is not going to offer much audible difference that merits the extra cost, when only a handful of people will have audio equipment capable of making the difference in bitrates noticable, and still then a physical CD will far exceed a 256 Kbps AAC file.

It is only with astonishment that I can belive that you have figured out a way to only increase the cost of music, in a market where it is already greatly overpriced already because of your strong arm tactics in controlling the output of the industry and preventing healthy competition on the online marketplace with digital restrictions.

I expect lossless FLAC/AAC, DRM-Free digital files at a reasonable price as I get with CD Audio. Why then is this not the case on the now significantly important online marketplace?


Kroc Camen.