Angus Kidman18 October 2007, 2:41 AM
Apple has confirmed plans to reduce the price on DRM-free music, but that's resulted in the entire iTunes Plus store going temporarily offline while the prices are being altered.
 Oops: we did it again |
Apple has confirmed plans to reduce the price on DRM-free music , but that's resulted in the entire iTunes Plus store going temporarily offline while the prices are being altered.
Individual tracks from iTunes Plus -- dominated by material from EMI, along with a handful of smaller independent labels -- have dropped in price from $2.19 to $1.69, bringing them in line with songs that are encrypted to only play within iTunes or on iPods. (In the US, a similar reduction has seen prices fall from $US1.29 to $US0.99.)
While that might seem like an incentive to go on a track-purchasing bonanza, rolling those changes through what Apple describes as "the largest DRM-free catalog in the world" is apparently taking a little time.
Visitors to the Australian iTunes Store attempting to access the Plus section this morning were instead greeted with the error message: "Could not complete the iTunes Store request. The store may be busy." Other sections of the store were functioning normally.
An Apple spokesperson confirmed that the problem was due to implementing the pricing changes. "The store is currently being updated and as it's a global rollout this can take some time,," a local representative told APC.
Creating price equivalence with encrypted music effectively means that there's no incentive to purchase the DRM-loaded versions of tracks from EMI and the other participating labels. When the store originally launched iTunes Plus in June, the higher audio quality of the Plus tracks was used as a justification for the higher per-track pricing.
Despite the reductions, Apple has yet to reflect the increasing strength of the Australian dollar in its pricing model. The US 99 cent price for tracks would translate to around $1.12 in local currency -- a far cry from the $1.69 Aussies currently pay.