Apple To Lower Price Of Unrestricted Music Downloads

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The New York Sun

Apple Inc. plans to lower the price of music sold without copyright protection to 99 cents a song, undercutting rivals less than five months after adding these tracks to its iTunes store.

The price cut, from $1.29, applies to music without so-called digital rights management software from EMI Group Plc as well as 2 million songs from independent labels, a spokesman from Apple, Tom Neumayr, said yesterday. Apple began offering DRM-free music as part of a service called “iTunes Plus” on May 30. The reduction comes after Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. began selling restriction-free tracks for less than Apple on their rival download music services. Consumers have bought more than 3 billion songs from iTunes since April 2003, making it the most popular site for legal music downloads.

“With Amazon stepping into the game and offering DRM-free music at a cheaper price, it gives Apple no option but to match that price,” a digital-media analyst with Forrester Research Inc., James McQuivey, said. “ITunes is a very powerful force and that’s one of the reasons that Amazon is trying to get into the market, because they know the labels may be trying to back someone as an alternative to Apple.”


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