In addition to earlier news about the additions to Liberty City’s radio stations, Rockstar has announced another change to Grand Theft Auto IV's musical experience.  Variety’s gaming blog, Cut Scene, is reporting that GTA IV’s “Zip” service, which allows players to tag in-game songs for real-life download, is undergoing a major change.  The service will still work the same, and can be used with the new songs included in The Lost and the Dead DLC pack, but will now be tied to iTunes instead of Amazon.com’s MP3 download service.  Less than a year after the launch of the service (which ties into players’ Rockstar Social Club account), Rockstar has decided to switch from Amazon’s service to the far more popular iTunes.  Though no official reason has been given, Variety reports that Rockstar “wanted downloaded songs to be available without DRM, so they wouldn't be restricted to a certain device.”

Once Apple announced that their entire music library would be made available DRM-free, this had to be a no-brainer for Rockstar.  iTunes is approximately 900 trillion times as popular as Amazon’s thing, and more players familiar with the download service means more players downloading tagged songs, which means KA-CHING for Rockstar.  And last I checked, Rockstar likes the KA-CHING.

The change-over will occur simultaneously with the release of the DLC, so to the eleven of you out there who actually prefer Amazon's store; you have five days.

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