More evidence that the music industry might finally be ‘getting it’ came with last week’s announcement by 7digital of its revamped music download service. Not only is the company moving towards DRM-free mp3 downloads (which, thanks to a recent deal with EMI, now account for over 50% of its catalogue), but has also introduced a ‘locker’ feature whereby purchased tracks and videos are accessible by users “from anywhere with an Internet connection”. Additionally, if for some reason you lose your original paid-for downloads, through a hard drive failure for example, you’re free to re-download those tracks at no extra cost. For me, this is a must have feature that the market leader, Apple’s iTunes, sorely lacks.

Users who purchase DRM-free tracks from Apple’s iTunes Plus store and then ‘accidently’ share those files with friends or via peer-to-peer networks, maybe in for a shock. Arstechnica is reporting that user account details (in form of full name and email address) are stored inside every track sold, making it possible to trace any copies back to the original purchaser — although it’s unlikely that such evidence would stand up in court, as in theory the data could be spoofed. So why is Apple doing this? The obvious answer is to make people think twice before sharing their music, and yet the company doesn’t seem to be informing customers that their details are embedded in the tracks they’ve bought.

Arstechnica suggest that another possible reason is that the company is helping the recording industry monitor so-called ‘casual’ piracy:

That said, it would be trivial for iTunes to report back to Apple, indicating that “Joe User” has M4As on this hard drive belonging to “Jane Userette,” or even “two other users.” This is not to say that Apple is going to get into the copyright enforcement business. What Apple and indeed the record labels want to watch closely is: will one user buy music for his five close friends?

Rather than being concerned with going after individual users who infringe copyright, it could be that the company wants to aggregate such data in order to analyze how much sharing of paid-for DRM-free music, actually takes place.

Either way, Apple should better inform customers of this practice, and also what they plan to use this hidden data for. It’s also worth remembering that it’s quite common for peer-to-peer file-sharing applications to ‘share’ a user’s music folder by default — so take note.

After announcing earlier in the year that in partnership with EMI, Apple was to start selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes, today the company declared its ‘iTunes Plus’ store open for business. The ‘Plus’ of course refers to the fact that the songs offered will not only be without Digital Rights Management (DRM) — the technology that restricts what you can do with your music, such as how many copies you can make or which devices it will playback on — but also that they will be encoded at a higher audio quality, and cost 30 cents more per-track.

On the day of the announcement, the decision to introduce premium pricing left me less than impressed.

Amazon has revealed plans to launch its own DRM-free music download store, in what many will see as a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes. By selling tracks in the mp3 format — without copyright protection — music from Amazon will be compatible with almost any digital music device including cell-phones, streaming media boxes, and mp3 players such as Apple’s very own iPod.

Amazon’s catalogue will initially comprise of music from the third largest record company, EMI, and thousands of smaller labels. Along with Apple, who also recently starting selling DRM-free music, Amazon’s clout should help pile on more pressure for the other major record labels to follow suit and embrace the mp3 format.

As the Financial Times points out:

The web-based retailer’s decision to enter the digital music market comes at a time when the record companies are desperate for a rival to iTunes. In spite of challenges from Microsoft, Yahoo and others, the Apple service still commands roughly 80 per cent of the online music market, which has allowed it to dictate terms to the music companies on pricing and other issues.

Amazon has said that the service will debut later this year, but hasn’t revealed details on pricing, except to say it will be “competitive”.