The return of free iTMS art

Since you can find it on a thousand other blogs right now, I won't go into all the neat stuff in the new iTunes 7. I will quickly say that gapless playback made me jump up and down. But onto the important stuff. Free album art is back, and not shady this time!

Look familiar?! Okay, probably not to many of you, but that is a packet capture of iTunes 7 downloading some free album art for me. They authenticate it the same way as they do with the art you buy with your songs! The "downloadKey" and everything! Well, this time "downloadKey2". Replacing the 600x600-100 with the lower increments brings up the thumbnailed versions once again.

But something strange is afoot here. This is not the same album art as I would get from buying the track. At least not with an album I have both copies of to compare with.

Mew - And The Glass Handed Kites. (great album)

Copy of the album art that came with the purchased track:
mew-andtheglassBOUGHT.jpg (60.1KB) - 600x600

Copy of the album art that was downloaded for me for free by iTunes:
mew-andtheglassFREE.jpg (330KB) - 600x538

Two different high quality album covers for the same album. Why go through all the trouble? Is this a fluke? Does anyone have any of their own examples of this?