A couple of weeks ago, I was disappointed by the media coverage about Amazon’s entry into digital music sales. The New York Times wrote: “Apple plans to start selling EMI’s songs as MP3 format later this month.” This is not true. Apple plans to start selling EMI’s songs without FairPlay DRM. They’ll still be AAC format files. Many popular “MP3 players” also play AAC files; it is just that Apple has not licensed FairPlay for use on them, so that those other players could not play music bought from the iTunes store.
I let this post sit as an unfinished draft since then, but now that I see it crop up in another story yesterday, I felt it was something that should be noted.