iTunes Plus in 'choose what to upgrade' climbdown

By Nate Lanxon on 30 January 2009, 11:27am

In a brazen u-turn, Apple's iTunes Store has changed its mind over upgrades to the DRM-free iTunes Plus format and will now let customers choose the songs and albums they want in the higher bit rate. Yup, that's right -- Apple now grants users the gift of choice!

You can now enjoy not upgrading Michael Bolton's Can I Touch You... There? and revel as you don't have to pay for a high-quality version of Mama Get The Hammer (There's A Fly On Papa's Head).

Remarkable, really. After a few weeks of demanding shoppers upgrade everything they've ever purchased, or nothing at all -- spending fat wads of Queen pics in the process -- Apple will now allow shoppers to upgrade the 100 tracks they want, leaving the other thousand on Apple's servers.

This should've been a feature enabled the instant iTunes went DRM-free. But later is better than never, we suppose, and now we don't have to pay £2 to upgrade and download Dream Theater's Live In Budokan album, which we since bought on CD and ripped into Apple Lossless anyway.

There's another twist to this tale, however. We've had a few CNET UK users complain that they've spent hundreds of pounds on iTunes downloads, and were faced with a whopping bill to upgrade the whole lot, when they only wanted to upgrade a selection of their songs. Can these users get a refund for the songs they didn't want to upgrade? We've contacted Apple for a comment. A spokesperson couldn't immediately respond, but we'll update this story when they do.