Apple will soon allow record companies more flexible pricing of songs on their iTunes music store. Songs may be priced at 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. In exchange for that, however, iTunes will make every available song completely DRM-free.

This essentially heralds the death of digital music purchases with DRM. While no doubt Amazon has been a big player in that (and in turn, they have received a lot of my business), this definitively puts the nail in the coffin. Since iTunes is the leader in digital music sales, all other stores will have no choice but to follow suit to remain even remotely competitive. This is great news for music lovers/tech geeks everywhere.

There are other possible ramifications for this move. I imagine more music players will start supporting AAC files, the format that iTunes uses, now that the songs will no longer require specially configured players (iPods) to play them. Also, with DRM gone, Apple has almost no good reason to keep their firmware locked down like they have with the past couple generations of iPods, so maybe future models will be more RockBox-friendly.