Apple successfully thwarts progress!

Apple has renewed it's agreement that allows them to keep all downloads on their popular iTunes site at a fixed price of 99cents/79p.


"Apple has insisted that its pricing model is the best way to drive forward the nascent digital music download market because it's simple and easy for consumers to understand."


I guess Apple doesn't have much faith in the intelligence or decision making capacity of their customers.

It must be nice as a retailer to have such an easily manageable inventory with which to work. Since the product is digital, a single copy replicated in a disk array (or maybe replicated a few times in case of serious hardware failure) is all you need: no excess stock and a single, low cost for storage of all products. Plus, some of the inventory is timeless and though popularity may fluctuate, never truly goes out of season. But there is plenty of crappy pop music that just like most other products, has a life cycle. So my question is, where is the damn sale rack? Every retailer in the world drops prices to increase velocity, why won't iTunes? I guess they'd rather decrease the breadth of their offering than break their universal price policy. Only one thing will change that lopsided policy...Competition.