iTunes Plus Now Offers Over Two Million Tracks at Just 99 Cents
DRM-Free Tracks with Higher Quality 256 kbps AAC Encoding — Apple® today announced that it has expanded its iTunes® Plus offering to over two million tracks and lowered the price of all iTunes Plus tracks to just 99 cents.
Context & Ripple Effects
The official announcement closes out a fast-moving week: reports surfaced on October 15 that iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks were expanding and dropping to 99 cents, and Steve Jobs confirmed the price cut across the board on October 16 before Apple made it formal today. The Wall Street Journal picking up the story underlines how closely the music industry and its investors are watching Apple's DRM posture.
What changed is the economics of the upgrade tier: over two million tracks are now sold without copy protection at 256 kbps AAC quality for the same 99-cent price as standard protected tracks, eliminating the premium that previously separated iTunes Plus from the regular catalog.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the expanded catalog get higher-quality, unprotected files at parity pricing — the 30-cent-or-so premium that once marked DRM-free tracks is gone across all two million-plus songs.
- Apple converts what was a niche upsell into the default-quality option for a large slice of the iTunes catalog, putting the DRM-free format on equal commercial footing with protected AAC.
Second-order effects
- Labels whose music sits outside the two-million-track catalog now face sharper questions about why their songs remain locked when rivals' sell unprotected at the same price — participation in iTunes Plus becomes a competitive marker among rights holders.
- Any competing download store still selling protected files at 99 cents loses its price argument against Apple's unprotected offering, forcing a choice between matching DRM-free terms or ceding the quality-and-freedom pitch.
Third-order effects
- If parity pricing holds, DRM stops functioning as a differentiator in mainstream music retail and becomes a liability for holdout labels, accelerating pressure to license full catalogs unprotected rather than track-by-track.
- The pattern points toward an industry where the retailer that aggregates the largest DRM-free catalog sets de facto wholesale terms — shifting bargaining power from rights holders toward the storefront.
The trend: Digital music retail is moving from copy-protected walled gardens toward DRM-free catalogs sold at parity prices, with Apple's catalog-expansion cadence setting the pace.