This should actually be really attractive to pirates. You know all those albums you downloaded, but could only find in 128 kbps? Well, spend $25, and all those can now be 256 kbps. I absolutely loathe iTunes, and that's attractive enough to me that I'm considering reinstalling it.
I doubt that there would be many albums that are not available at at least 256kbps from various file-sharing networks. A pirate would have to first search their favourite file sharing network anyway to get the music they then have to pay Apple to listen to.
