Like just about everyone, I’m glad to hear that Apple will be selling DRM-free music via iTunes. But I think I’m even more excited by this:
In return, Apple agreed to a long-standing demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents. Instead, the majority of songs in the store will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.
I suspect, given my tastes, I’m more likely to be downloading 69 cent music than $1.29 music, so what’s left on my Christmas gift cards will stretch that much further. I’ll have to decide if I also want to pay the music tax and upgrade the existing songs I have to DRM-free, but that can wait till another day. In the meantime, I’ll probably just collect some ideas for downloads and wait till April to pull the trigger on them.
Here’s what I posted on my Chron blog about it last week.
http://blogs.chron.com/brokenrecord/2009/01/want_your_old_itunes_tracks_dr.html