Music News: New iTunes Pricing, Beatles Remasters

Digital music and reissues are a couple of the leading music-related news stories this week...

iTunes pricing: This week iTunes finally introduced its new pricing structure. While much of the attention has been on the new $1.29 price for popular tracks, there's been much less mention of the fact that many tracks will remain at 99 cents, and some songs will sell for 69 cents. As iPod Observer notes, all iTunes songs are now DRM-free and encoded at 256kbps (which the store calls iTunes Plus).

On a related note, I've read that Amazon has increased the price of some of its MP3 downloads to $1.29, but a quick scan through some of their offerings showed tracks at the usual 99 cents. Anyone come across Amazon.com tracks costing more?

Remastered Beatles albums coming: The music industry is expected to get a big boost in the Fall when all of the studio recordings by the Beatles are to come out in remastered versions. Sept. 9th is the expected date for the reissues, which many music fans say is long overdue. As for digital versions of Beatles music... well, no news on that, unfortunately.

New iTunes Prices (Higher, That Is) Coming April 7th

The iTunes price increase for songs it deems the "hottest" selections will go into effect on April 7th, it's been confirmed. Record labels have long wanted variable pricing (and higher prices) for digital downloads. Steve Jobs has never seemed to be in a hurry to raise the cost of a song, since Apple is using the iTunes store as a loss leader for selling iPods.

But now you'll pay 30% more if you want the latest hits or certain classic or in-demand backlist titles (not sure exactly how they've going to determine which older tracks should have the higher price).

If you don't like the new higher prices, CMT.com (Web site of Country Music Television) suggests checking out Spun.com, which will buy your old CDs that you no longer want, and sell you new ones. CMT gives some examples, saying that you can get many country CDs for less than eight dollars, and get three dollars or more for the ones you sell... meaning you can get a full-length CD for about the cost of five songs on iTunes.

Sounds like a good deal to me.