Should you pay more for “Mastered for iTunes”?

Question: During mastering, should I pay more to get my songs “Mastered for iTunes”?

Answer: Probably not. Nowadays, this could be an unnecessary upcharge.

To learn why, it’s mastering history time.

What is “Mastered for iTunes”?

“Mastered for iTunes” was a set of engineering specifications and practices that were first developed by Apple, to ensure high-quality digital sound across the original iTunes music platform. You can look up their technical details on the public Apple Support pages.

These specs have since been rebranded, and today they’re called “Apple Digital Masters”, where they’re the technical guidance for delivery on the Apple Music platform:

Apple Digital Masters: the new “Mastered for iTunes”.

Back in the heyday of OG iTunes (the early 2000’s), “Mastered for iTunes” was indeed a unique selling point for that platform, and something that you could pay more for.

Mastered for iTunes blows up

Since their introduction, these specifications have become so successful they’re now the basis for pretty much all high-quality digital audio streamed across the entire Internet. That’s happened because their use encourages top quality digital sound on all of the different music streaming platforms, not only Apple products.

This is the rare example of a large corporation investing in developing an open engineering standard, and it then becoming mainstream, to everyone’s benefit. Thank you, Apple!

The “Mastered for iTunes” specifications later became the technical foundation that many other modern streaming music platforms have built their own versions of, including Spotify.

Today, music mastered for the Apple Music streaming service still advises meeting similar delivery specs.

Do you need to pay more for this?

At this point, working to the Mastered for iTunes/Apple Digital Masters specifications has been standard practice in the professional mastering industry for about 20 years.

Mastered for iTunes has become the new normal, and is now the level of quality you expect to hear everywhere.

That means, nowadays, any high-quality mastering engineer will be working to the Mastered for iTunes/Apple Digital Masters specifications on everything they put out of their studio, not charging you more to do it.