Apple wins iTunes pricing battle in US

99 cents a song here to stay

2 May 2006 9:57 GMT / By Stuart Miles

After months of negotiations and rumours, Apple has confirmed in the US that it has renewed contracts with the four largest record companies to sell songs through its iTunes Music store for 99 cents each.

The discussion which has raged for over 6 months centred around the music industry wanting to put prices up while Apple insisted that the prices should remain the same.

At one point it looked like Apple would be forced to introduce multiple price points for the iTunes music store.

EMI Group boss Alain Levy, along with executives from Sony BMG and Warner Music Group, have been pushing Jobs publicly and privately to move to a tiered pricing system, where older, less popular songs would be sold for less than the current price and more popular songs in higher demand could more sold for considerably more.

iTunes currently dominates the US digital download market with an 80% market share.

ZDNet reports that Apple declined to comment on how long the new deals will last.

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Audio, Online, Music downloads, Apple