This is the sort of reason I buy my stuff from Amazon / 7digital. The mp3 container format has no provision for DRM so it cannot be abused.
Yeah, I can infer the fact that it is non-DRM from the mp3 format, but other than that it's still shadier and less informative than the average piracy side.
Not to mention insulting and utterly useless to me and 16 million fellow countrymen in one of the richest Western nations, were, oh surprise, piracy rules.
To be honest, I download the track elsewhere always and pay for it if I think it's worth it and delete it if it's not.
You can't tell much from a 30 second clip most of the time, especially when the motivation is still to produce albums filled with padding (shit).
They need to just release singles and do away with the whole album principle.
As for quality - if you want that, you need to buy the damn CD and rip it how you want. Most of the decent quality mp3 rips are rubbish enough to notice if you have a high end setup but for casual/normal users and ears, it's fine.
Perhaps they should ship as one mp3 with a cue file?
Why would you trust Apple not to do it though? They haven't exactly been trustworthy on any front over the years.
1. The report is only that the files have the 'm4p' extension. There seems to be no-one confirming that the files actually have DRM, just that they have the extension the old DRM'd files used to have.
2. Reports of people being able to convert to m4a from within iTunes. A DRM system that has a "remove the DRM from this file" option... isn't DRM.
Which makes me wonder whether they're just the same normal non-DRM'd files, but being offered up with the wrong extension.