SAN FRANCISCO — Apple said it would begin selling song downloads without the anticopying measures that have been part of its iTunes music store since it opened in 2003. It will also move away from its insistence on pricing songs at 99 cents.
Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, announced the changes at the Macworld Expo here. They are the product of a new deal between Apple and the three largest music companies: Sony BMG, the Universal Music Group and the Warner Music Group.
As the recording industry has sought for years, the price of many older and less popular songs in the store will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest new hits will go for $1.29. Others that are in more moderate demand will remain at 99 cents.
In 2007, Apple made a deal with EMI, the smallest of the four major record companies, to sell higher-quality audio files of its songs without digital rights management, or D.R.M., the security software that limits how many copies a customer can make of a download, and also restricts what devices the song can be played on.
Many analysts saw the demise of D.R.M. as an inevitability, since the major labels have been selling music without those restrictions through other large online retailers, like Amazon.com and Rhapsody.
But Apple’s concession over pricing was seen as a victory for the labels, which have been struggling for eight years with steep losses in sales of physical CDs.
“It’s not something that’s necessarily going to be a blockbuster,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group. “But if you could increase the value of the average customer by 10, 20, 30 percent, that’s a huge win for the labels, because they’re struggling to find those incremental revenue sources.”
Mr. Schiller said in his speech that Apple would immediately offer 8 million songs without D.R.M. and add the store’s remaining 2 million songs by the end of the quarter.
From NYtimes.com
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