Apple Announces End to DRM, Tiered Pricing on iTunes

Wait, people still buy music?

Apple Inc. closed its final appearance at the Macworld trade show Tuesday by cutting the price of some songs in its market-leading iTunes online store to as little as 69 cents and disclosing that soon every track will be available without copy protection.Apple’s top marketing executive, Philip Schiller, said iTunes songs would come in three pricing tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. Record companies will choose the prices, which marks a significant change, since Apple previously made all songs sell for 99 cents.

Apple offered the record labels that flexibility on pricing as it got them to agree to sell all songs free of “digital rights management” (DRM) technology that limits people’s ability to copy songs or move them to multiple computers. By the end of this quarter, Apple said, all 10 million songs in its library will be available without DRM.

Other than that, this year’s MacWorld expo – the first to not feature Apple honcho Steve Jobs in quite awhile and apparently the last MacWorld Apple itself plans to take part in – didn’t really have anything exciting to offer. There’s a new 17-inch Macbook Pro for people who have $3k to throw at a laptop, a couple of updates to shitty Apple software that no one really uses anyway, and the news that Steve Jobs doesn’t have AIDS or cancer again, but rather some sort of “hormonal” imbalance. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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