As I reported in my previous rant, Apple has put it’s three tier music pricing into effect on the iTunes store. In a nut, it means songs can be priced at $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29 based on the artists’ popularity. This is a true supply and demand style format, and doesn’t sound unreasonable. The reason it’s so hard to choke down (for me at least) was Apple set up the iTunes store in 2003 with simplicity in mind. The only price you had to worry about was $.99, simple. The upside to this news is all music is now DRM free.

This move can only be taken as a “give and take” attempt by Apple, to get the big music labels to support a DRM free music store. That means Apple had to give up it’s one price point, so in turn the music labels would allow tracks to be sold without DRM. As I said previously, this may backfire and Apple will be left holding the smoking gun.