News: iTunes Plus provides DRM-free music for a cost

iTunes New Zealand joins a worldwide makeover of Apple’s music store today. iTunes 8 is now available, and with it sees the elimination of copy protection, but not without a cost. The introductiion of the high quality, DRM-free music also see the introduction of a new three-tier pricing plan. All nine million songs on Apple’s music store are “iTunes Plus”, DRM-free, 256Kbps and priced at $1.29, $1.79 or a new top rate of $2.39 depending on popularity.

For official guff see below what Apple had to say on their website.
High-quality, DRM-free music.
iTunes Plus is the new standard on iTunes.

Now, you can choose from millions of iTunes Plus songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independents. With iTunes Plus, you get high-quality, 256-Kbps AAC encoding. All free of burn limits and digital rights management (DRM). So iTunes Plus music will play on iPod, Apple TV, all Mac and Windows computers, and many other digital music players. It’s also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don’t have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 50¢ per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are $1.00 and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)

www.apple.com/nz/itunes/whatsnew