DRM is Dead, but Apple’s iTunes Plus Upgrade Policy is Brain-Dead – UPDATE

Apple finally announced yesterday that DRM is dead on the iTunes Store (with 80% of tracks DRM-free today, and the remainder by the end of March). Since the advent of iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks, they have offered a paid “upgrade” from DRMed tracks to higher-quality DRM-free versions. But the way Apple does this is dumb, and penalizes consumers. Read a rant I wrote about this for Macworld.As of January 28, 2009, Apple has changed their policy, and you can now upgrade individual albums or songs (if you purchased the songs on their own). I would like to think that my Macworld article had something to do with this change…I’ve upgraded a few classical albums, and the process went smoothly. In addition, iTunes picked up on the fact that I had changed some of the tags (I put composers in the Artist tag), and set the tags on the new files correctly, so I don’t even need to make changes. It did add an Album Artist tag, which I delete, but that’s no big deal.