Apple made 2 big announcements today at the Mac world conference in San Francisco that mean good news for digital djs:
- The price of digital downloads will be lowered to as little as .69 cents
- All songs will be DRM free!
If you started digital djing 5 years ago, iTunes was the only place to reliably buy new mp3’s but it was a major hassle. They were in AAC format at 128kbs and had to be burned to a disc, then re-imported to strip them of the DRM so the file could be played in dj software. The physical inconvenience aside, this was an important development in music- and many of us considered DRM to be a very dangerous precedent for the future. In response I created the poster above for the CRFTP project (now retired) and it became a battle cry against DRM with appearances all over the net. Its with great pride and excitement that I now get to tell you that we have won and DRM (at least on the apple store) has finally given way to the power of the people.
Now that the songs in the iTunes music store are going to be high quality and DRM free it might become your new favorite place to discover new tunes.
Like the art?
After writing this I realized that we still have a few of the original down with DRM posters here in the office so I put them all up for sale in the web store. There are 3 different posters that were hand numbered and screen printed back in 2004 and it seems silly to keep them all. Only 37 were ever printed and about 10 of each remain so if your into constructionist art- you might consider picking one up while they last.
