Apple offers variable pricing, more DRM-free music on iTunes

After fighting with record labels over its everything-for-99-cents stance, Apple today said it would finally start offering different songs at different prices. Apple is the No. 1 music seller in the U.S., so the fact that it's finally doing what capitalists everywhere have always done -- charge more for, say, a hot new Lil Wayne track and less for an old tune by Yanni -- is sure to ripple through the music industry and could give consumers more reasons to buy digital downloads.

In the new iTunes pricing system, songs will cost either 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 apiece. In a press release, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs (who let Senior Vice President Phil Schiller handle today's Macworld keynote address) said that "many more songs" would cost 69 cents than $1.29. Apple said it would set the prices based on what the record labels charge it. The company started giving content owners a little more pricing flexibility last year after a major dispute with NBC Universal; Apple agreed to let NBC sell some of its movies and TV shows for prices other than usual $1.99 it had charged for videos.

Another big change announced today: Apple's entire music catalog -- 8 million songs today and the remaining 2 million by the end of March -- is going to be available in versions that are stripped of anti-copying software. That means that you have the option to say goodbye to the digital handcuffs that limit the type of digital media players you can transfer music to and the number of times you can burn a playlist to CD.

Apple previously had offered DRM-free music from only EMI Group, but it said today that it had reached similar deals with the other big three record labels: Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. ITunes users who have bought music in the past can upgrade their songs to the DRM-free format, which Apple calls iTunes Plus, for 30 cents a song or 30% of the cost of an album.

Finally, Apple is letting iPhone 3G owners download music to their hand-held devices via the 3G network like they currently can via Wi-Fi.

-- Chris Gaither

Photo: Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller delivers the keynote speech at the Macworld show. Credit: John G. Mabanglo

Comments

[Joe Schmoe]

So what you are saying is that a twenty year old song will now be on the Billboard top 100 and new songs won't make the charts for say, about ten or so years.

Why pay 30% more for DRC-free music on iTunes when other outlets offer that for no additional charge?

[Jason]

To the comment at 1:45, the 30 percent is referring to songs already purchased. This allows a user with songs previously purchased with DRM to upgrade it to a version without DRM.you're paying for additional flexibility that wasn't available before. It has nothing to do with other music providers. Blame the record companies. Not Apple.

[WTL]

It's not clear to me from the article that I can record my Apple tunes using, for example, Toast Titanium instead of iTunes. I don't like iTunes's recorder and grew resentful of Apple's restrictions on music I now owned. It's hard for me to believe that music companies restricted the recorder to iTunes only - what's the point? Restricting the player was bad enough. I stopped shopping iTunes for just that reason and have never found enough reason to go back. Except for a couple of dozen iTunes downloads, I'm free to use my huge music collection the way I want.

[michael]

With iTunes -software and store- Apple established a very closed environment for music listening. Now that DRM are vanishing from its offer, next step for Apple should be to open the iTunes software to other file formats (flac, ogg, wma, etc.). The following step should be to learn from the Songbird player experience and give developers a way to add functionnality to its iTunes software.