Apple Announces New iTunes Song Prices, DRM-Free

by Jarrett Martineau | January 6, 2009 at 03:47 pm

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Remember back in the day when you could download any mp3 from the iTunes store for a quick & easy 99¢?

Well, those days are about to change.

At Macworld this year, Apple announced a new, three price point sales structure that will change the way songs are sold through the site.

Instead of a uniform dollar-less-a-penny price, songs will be sold for 69¢, 99¢. and $1.29.

The company claims that "more songs will be sold at the lower price point than at the higher" but it's not clear how that determination is going to be made.

Will popular music be cheaper and more obscure music be more expensive?

At the Macworld Conference & Expo on Tuesday (January 6), Apple Vice President Philip Schiller revealed iTunes pricing changes and a new MacBook Pro, CNN reports.
Schiller explained that the new iTunes store will have pricing ranks, offering songs at three different price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. More songs will be sold at the lower price point than at the higher, Schiller said. The pricing shift comes more than a year after Apple almost shut down its iTunes store in protest of a proposed royalty hike that would threaten the store's 99-cent price structure.

Oh and, by the way, all songs from iTunes will, finally, be DRM-free.

Now that's an improvement!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced today that all songs at the iTunes store will soon be available without the previous anti-piracy protection software DRM.

Jobs said that from today, all four major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels, are offering their music in iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free format with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality which is “virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings”.