Look, the whole "price rise" thing came about because of two things: Jobs wanted DRM to go, and he wanted to keep the price the same. He'd already won one round with the labels, because they wanted the prices to go up a year before. The second year, Jobs dug his heels in. He also came out with the DRM thing. He eventually compromised with the higher bitrate, no-DRM premium price -- after the labels had refused to budge on iTunes pricing while giving the lower price, with no DRM, to Amazon and others. They wanted to break iTunes, period, because it had screwed them on pricing at least twice. Or, that's the way (some) of the labels thought. Jobs eventually got the labels to drop all DRM, a year after they had already done it with others. Once they did that, they felt they had the ability to set prices however they wanted. Remember, the labels were talking about variable pricing that they could raise. If something was going to be a big hit, they wanted the ability to reach into iTunes and raise the price in an instant. Screw economic THEORY. That dictates that as supply goes up, price comes DOWN. But the "supply" of digital music is artificially enforced scarcity. Make a billion copies, there's always the masters to go back to. As many copies of the music as there are electrons. That's why, eventually, the labels released all the music to everyone who charges what they want.