iTunes and DRM no Longer Synonymous!

"Apple Inc. is cutting the price of some songs in its market-leading iTunes online music store to 69 cents and plans to begin selling all tracks without copy protection."

Started over 6 years ago, the iTunes Store has become the go-to place for music.  

During this time, iTunes has amassed library of approximately 10 million songs. An indicator of why they are the most popular online music site is the more than 75 million accounts that have been created, not to mention the over 6 billion songs that have been sold. In recent years, however, there has been some competition, mainly from Amazon.com's mp3 store that started offering DRM-free music in 2007.

Well, that disadvantage is now gone thanks to today's announcement from Apple's Marketing Director Phil Schiller. During his keynote at Macworld, he announced that 8 million of the approximately 10 million songs, called iTunes Plus, are going to be available, DRM-free, as of today. These songs will be available at the higher 256k bitrate and you will be able to upgrade your entire library to the DRM-free music by paying the difference between what you originally paid and the new price. The other approximately 2 million songs will be offered DRM-free by the end of March 2009.

Another change to the store is the pricing structure. iTunes is going to start reducing prices on some songs to 69 cents, and will have a three tier pricing structure: 69 cents for back catalog tracks, 99 cents for standard songs  and $1.29 for new or popular releases. This is scheduled to start in April of 2009 and on the face of it appears to be appeasing the labels, who have wanted tiered pricing for some time.

So two new changes to the iTunes store, could there be more? Well I'm glad you asked!

iTunes will be open to not only WiFi access, but will now allow access via the 3G network. Finally! Not sure about any of you but I am not always around a convenient WiFi connection so this is great update. 

You can read all about it at Apple Insider or direct from Apple, and in my opinion, this is a welcome change! What do you think?