Apple Loosens Music Restrictions

Apple announced yesterday at Macworld in San Francisco that it would eliminate the copyright protection software currently in place on all music the company sells.  CEO Steve Jobs had been calling for the elimination of the software, known as DRM, since early in 2007, but had met resistance from the record companies, although the record companies had permitted other retailers to sell music without the DRM software.  The new music sales will be higher-quality than previous iTunes downloads, at 256 KB per second AAC encoding instead of 128 KB MP3.

This seems like good news, but there is of course a drawback.  The record companies had been going crazy over iTunes’ flat pricing, so in exchange for allowing Apple to sell music without DRM, the record companies have gotten Apple to introduce variable pricing – some songs will now sell for 69 cents, some for 99 and some for $1.29.  And of course every song you want will be $1.29.  I’m not sure if this is a positive development or not.

Source: Yahoo!
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