Building on its previous 'Mastered for iTunes' program, Apple Music has a new initiative to promote the creation and sales of higher-quality songs on its service.
Apple's current free tools to help make optimised high-quality music
has launched a new initiative called Apple Digital Masters, which is intended to bring all of the service's highest-quality recordings into a single place. These are currently the tracks that have been produced using Apple's free Mastered for iTunes tools.
According to Billboard, this is the first public acknowledgement of a plan that has been underway for some time.
Reportedly, Apple says that the 75% of the current US Top 100 tracks -- and 71% of the worldwide Top 100 -- are already Apple Digital Masters.
The Mastered for iTunes program gave producers and musicians drag-and-drop Apple Audio Mastering Tools that let them preview how their music would sound after it's been encoded for Apple Music.
The news of the new push to expand the use of this facility comes after rival service Tidal announced it was providing 'master-quality' tracks.
It's also likely that the move to Apple Digital Masters is because Apple is stepping away from using the term iTunes in favor of Music for its forthcoming macOS Catalina.