Apple expands DRM-free music selection

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>> So what's new with iTunes in 2009? I'd like to tell you about 3 things today that are happening. First, price. As you know, we've worked with all the major music companies as well as thousands of independents and over the last 6 years, we've had one pricing model for all songs, 99 cents. And the music companies have told us they want more flexibility. So starting in April, we're gonna give them more flexibility because we're gonna create 3 pricing tiers. It'll still be 99 cents plus it'll be a pricing tier at 69 cents and at a dollar 29, and based on how they choose to offer us their music, we'll sell them at 69.99 and 1.29. And I can tell you we know already that more songs are gonna be sold or offered at 69 than 1.29. So there's gonna be a benefit for a lot of customers. It's not the first thing, what we're doing with price and that comes in April. The second thing we're doing, iTunes Plus. If you follow what we've done with iTunes Plus, you probably already know what iTunes Plus is but for those who don't, iTunes Plus is a way that we offer music that is completely DRM-free. You can put it on as many computers that you own. It's also encoded in a much higher quality bit rate, 256 KB encoding of AAC, so it's nearly indistinguishable from the original recording. And for customers that have already purchased music, iTunes Plus offers a really easy way to upgrade your whole library to iTunes Plus. But what's new today is that we've worked with all the major music companies and starting today we're going to offer 8 million of the songs all DRM-free, 8 million.

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>> And by the end of this quarter, we'll finish out the 2 million more in all 10 million songs of iTunes will now be DRM-free.

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>> Just in case so we didn't understand, I had to make one more slide on it.

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>> All songs will be DRM-free in iTunes and in the iTunes Plus.

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>> Now as I said, it's really easy to go in and upgrade your entire library to iTunes Plus and upgrade all your music to now being DRM-free. So that's iTunes Plus. That's the second thing. The third new thing happening with iTunes has to do with the iPhone. As you know in the iPhone we have the iTunes WiFi music store and it's the most popular wireless music store for buying music on devices like cell phones and you can go in and you can see what's hot, you can check the top albums and songs, you can find an album you wanna buy, buy the album, buy the song and now, with the iTunes music store, it's no longer the iTunes' WiFi music store, it's just the iTunes music store because it supports downloading and buying your music on both WiFi and 3G cellular networks.

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>> So that means you get access to all these songs at the same price. A lot of others don't do that, at the same price that we've talked about. It's the same selection, all that incredible over 10 million songs available to you right on your iPhone. It's the same quality, up to 256 KB encoding of AAC you get right over the air on your iPhone. This means that you can, on your iPhone, preview and purchase music now anytime, anywhere whether on WiFi or 3G networks. And whenever you sync your iPhone back to your computer, we sync back the music. It's the same music on your iTunes in your computer and iTunes on your phone. This is a really big step for wireless music on cell phones and that starts today. Today you can start using iTunes over your 3G network.

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