Apple did something interesting this Tuesday with its removal of DRM from most of its digital music catalog. Not only was the DRM removed from new music, but you could also get it removed from music you had already purchased – for an “upgrade” fee. I’ve bought a few tunes on from Apple’s music store because it was so easy, and at the time, I saw DRM as a concession we’d just have to make in order to coax the record industry into the 21st century. Yes, I was willing to pay extra for what should have been there (or not there) in the first place. Paying the “upgrade” fee to remove DRM from previously purchased music didn’t make me feel like a complete sucker, though, because I was also getting tracks that were encoded at a better quality. Now the quality is still not CD quality. It’s just closer than what I had before. It’s also closer than the files that I ripped from my CD library when I started the shift towards a hard disk based music library – at a time when storage space was slightly more expensive and I just couldn’t justify taking up more space for a gain in quality I could hardly hear. But here’s what I think is really cool. My “upgrade” was actually a format shift, not unlike the format shift from records to tapes and from tapes to CDs. A file type and encoding is analagous to a tape or CD in that it is a container to make transporting that idea that came from some artist’s head easier, with an acceptable fidelity. The difference is that this format shift was able to happen on the same medium.
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