Apple is cutting the price of some songs in its market-leading iTunes online store to as little as 69 cents and plans to make every track available without copy protection.

In Apple's final appearance at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco, Apple's top marketing executive, Philip Schiller, said on Tuesday that iTunes song prices will come in three tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29.

Record companies will choose the prices, which marks a significant change, since Apple previously made all songs sell for 99 cents.

Apple gave the record labels that flexibility on pricing as it got them to agree to sell all songs free of "digital rights management," or DRM. The technology limits people's ability to copy songs or move them to multiple computers. Apple had been offering a limited selection of songs without DRM, but the company said by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs in its library will be available that way.

"We are thrilled to be able to offer our iTunes customers DRM-free iTunes Plus songs in high quality audio and our iPhone 3G customers the ability to download music from iTunes anytime, anywhere over their 3G network at the same price as downloading to your computer or via Wi-Fi," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.

The iTunes Store is the world's most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 10 million songs, over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films