So last night on American Idol they mentioned that you could download songs from their site. I assumed they’d be using Windows Media, but I was happily surprised to be wrong. The songs are listed as “CD Quality 320kbps MP3” and sell for $0.99. That’s better quality than you’d get from the iTunes Store - and no DRM restrictions.
This is change from last year which used 256kbps Windows Media Audio - aka “Will Not Play On Your iPod”.
This is cool because I can download an extended version of the song and play it on my iPod or my Palm or my CD player (I’ve got one that plays MP3 CDs).
Their tech support “Knowledge Base” needs a little work. Here’s a direct quote (using their font sizing)
Can I put songs on my iPod? Only MP3s will work on iPod. We currently do not support the iPod format - only devices that will work with the Windows Media Player.
So they don’t support the iPod, but the MP3s will work.
Huh-wha?
I think what happened is that they used to use the Windows Media Audio format, which doesn’t work on the iPod, so you got the 2nd line there, and then they changed to MP3s this year, so they added the line about MP3s.
What’s really interesting is that this comes at a time when people are talking a lot about DRM. I wonder if they realized they lost a lot of potential sales last year by not offering an iPod-compatible format, and this year we have the Zune (well, apparently a few people have them) which doesn’t support the PlaysForSure DRM that Microsoft used to push.
Looks like American Idol decided that they would be better off avoiding one or the other DRM scheme and just going with MP3s. I wonder if they are encoding some information in the MP3 tags to identify who bought them?
The videos, however, still use Windows Media and therefore are not compatible with Video iPods.
Other songs (like those from previous years’ contestants) are still sold in Windows Media Audio, so what the support entry about should say is:
Can I put these songs and videos on my iPod? Songs from the current season are available in MP3 format, which are compatible with almost any MP3 player including the iPod and the Zune. Other songs and videos are in Windows Media format and will only work in certain devices.
Not perfect, but much clearer.