According to The Economist, Apple poobah Steve Jobs doesn’t like the noxious way iTunes cripples the songs it sells any more than the rest of us. Rather, he claims, the record companies made him do it. This seems fairly shortsighted on their part: Once you’ve released one CD of an album, convertible to unprotected MP3, it’s going to make it on to the p2p network. So, as the article suggests, it’s doubtful there’s much marginal impact on piracy from crippling the music people download from one source. Indeed, if anything, I’d expect people who might otherwise be happy to buy a song for download end up going to those p2p networks just to avoid the DRM. In any event, though, this doesn’t explain why Apple applies the same DRM to all their tracks, since presumably at least some labels aren’t quite so demanding. Are (say) Matador and Dischord insisting on this bullshit as well?

In any event, those of us who don’t want to wait around for Sony to get religion may want to check out (thanks Liz!) Amie Street: Songs start free and rise in price the more they’re downloaded, though per-song cost still maxes out below the iTunes standard $0.99. And they’re all in sweet, sweet uncrippled MP3.