Steve Jobs hits a flat note Apple's new gambit to sell DRM-free songs on iTunes as a premium product flies in the face of common sense. I learned that two years ago from a 19-year-old community college student.	Rick Merritt Computing Editor
I gave this niece of a friend one of those $20 iTunes debit cards you find in the checkout line as a birthday present. She opened it and looked up at me like I was from another planet. Instantly I got it. This quintessential heavy iPod user had no concept of going to iTunes to buy a song. As she and many millions of her peers see it, digital music is free. You rip it off your CDs and get it off Limewire. So why would she want to go to iTunes and buy a premium song for 30 percent more than the usual 99 cents? Certainly not because it was encoded in 256 Kbit/s Advanced Audio Coding. Whazzat? And certainly not because it is DRM free. Her entire collection of MP3s is like totally DRM free, ya know. What a growing number of digital media users might like to do is tap into content for non-Apple players. But that content would need to be in a widely supported format like MP3, not Apple's favored AAC. I suppose a few Golden Ear listeners will appreciate the new premium product Apple is trying to create. But for the rest of us--fugidabodit I appreciate that Steve Jobs wants to push the boundaries of digital media. Perhaps he should first enquire exactly where those boundaries are. Posted by Rick Merritt on Apr 2, 2007 04:53 PM in Computing

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