Apple Launches Revolutionary "iTunes Plus" Service

Apple Inc. on Wednesday introduced “iTunes Plus”, an unprecedented iTunes service that allows customers to buy thousands of digital tracks without copy protection, enabling them to listen to the song, for the first time, directly on portable MP3 players, including Microsoft's Zune.

Apple’s iTunes Plus, a new copy protection-free music download service that has begun offering songs Wednesday, apparently comes as part of its move to strengthen its dominance in the online music industry. This is a kind of service music fans and industry players have been demanding for some time.

In April Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs announced their deal to sell unprotected content from recording company EMI Group PLC, the world's third-largest music company by sales. Apple announced that British music giant EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store worldwide in May.

Initially featuring DRM-free songs from London based-EMI, ITunes Plus includes music from Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra, Pink Floyd and more than a dozen of Paul McCartney's classic albums.

"Our customers are very excited about the freedom," Jobs said in a statement. "We expect more than half of the songs on iTunes will be offered in iTunes Plus versions by the end of this year."

DRM removed tracks from EMI feature higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality similar to the original recording, and cost $1.29 per song. Moreover, iTunes customers can easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song, subject to the availability, or $3 for most albums, Apple said.

"Our customers told us two things deterred them from buying digital," said Barney Wragg, the global head of digital music at EMI. "They weren't 100 percent confident that the songs they'd purchase could play on their devices, and they wanted something closer to CD quality."

After revolutionizing the personal computing with its Macintosh line of desktop and notebook computers, and digital media market with its most popular iPod, the Cupertino, California based Apple is shortly coming up with a multifunctional device, called iPhone, which is expected to revolutionise the mobile arena.

The much-anticipated iPhone, an all-in-one cell phone/iPod/pocket computer, will hit the European market in the fourth quarter and in Asia it will go on sale in 2008.

The iPod/Mac maker's iTunes Music store boasts of more than 70 percent of digital music sales in the United States. To date, Apple has sold nearly 2.5 billion songs via its online music store, of which nearly 45 percent were purchased as albums. It sells individual protected tracks for 99-cents per track.

Apple’s music store features the world's largest catalog with more than four million songs, 350 television shows and over 400 movies. The iTunes Store has sold over 50 million TV shows and over 1.3 million movies, making it the world's most popular online music, TV and movie store.

Apple's shares jumped $3.35, or 2.9%, to $117.70 in afternoon trading on Wednesday. Earlier, shares peaked at $117.87, diminishing a prior 52-week high of $115.