Mastered for iTunes
2012 finally marked an upswing in music sales, and hopefully represents a turning point to better economics for independent musicians. Most of the new growth is from digital downloads and most interestingly vinyl. Also the CD is still an important medium and continues on.
Because MP3 files are inherently quality compromised to allow for easy delivery and storage, folks like us have been sounding the alarm for better quality for consumers.
It seems that Apple got the message with their "Mastered for iTunes" program they started last year.
The gist of this is, they are still selling "lossy-compressed" music files to fans, but rather than accepting only CD Quality as input, they are opening up to larger, higher resolution recordings. The idea is that a better input results in a better end-product. We can provide these mastered for iTunes files for you during your mastering session.
These special high-res master files are also good for selling on Bandcamp (my favorite). Other sites like Reverb Nation will ask us to provide WAV files at CD quality, and prepared MP3 files.
On a related note, in our tests, we have discovered our mastering system provides very good MP3 encoding, so let us know if you'd like to have us prepare them or any other digital format while mastering your project.
