Apple to scrap premium pricing for DRM-free tracks

That didn't take long. Less than five months after Apple announced it would sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes at a premium, it's now saying it will abandon the more expensive pricing structure. In the coming days, iTunes will offer songs stripped of DRM at the same price as those with the restrictive copyright protections, Steve Jobs told today's Wall Street Journal, after Ars Technica broke the across-the-board pricing scoop.

The sudden announcement now has the hopeful wondering: is this finally the beginning of the end for DRM?

Well, not so fast. The reality is that Apple is making the pricing change to knock off pesky competitors such as Amazon.com, which recently launched a DRM-free music store in the US. Amazon's big sales push is awfully compelling: for 89 cents, you can download a DRM-free track, playable on any device.

By dropping the price, Jobs is simply trying to stop any momentum Amazon.com achieves with its DRM-free store. What does Apple care if a 30 per cent price cut eats into iTunes' presumably razor-thin margins?

Still, the labels cannot be happy. DRM will go down in history (eventually) as an ineffective and costly technology that succeeded in robbing the consumer of choice and reducing the quality of the finished product. The best the labels could hope for in a post-DRM world is to reach an agreement with consumers that would mean more choice and higher-quality at a premium price.

But it appears that something-for-nothing idea was killed in its infancy by market forces. Yes, it would be wrong for the labels to blame Jobs and iTunes for the imminent demise of this pricing gambit. It's consumer choice that appears to be burying the premium-priced DRM-free model. Not Mr Jobs.

Comments

[CapnZilog]

Amazon is the first, and only, music download service to meet my needs - and is still the only one I use today. Well-encoded, completely generic DRM-free MP3's at a good price; Exactly. So simple, so pure - and so obvious. Why is it so hard for other services to live up to this obvious concept?