Come April, Apple will jack up prices of some singles in its iTunes digital media store (largest online store for Indian songs??) to $1.29.

Currently, single tracks are 99 cents with most albums at $9.99.

At Macworld,  Apple today announced a new three-tier pricing structure – the songs will be available at one of three price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29, with most albums still at $9.99.

Apple claims many more songs will be priced at 69 cents than $1.29. We’ll believe that when we see that.

Also, we suspect we’ll see junk for 69 cents and $1.29 for the more popular tracks.

Besides 10 million songs (including tons of Bollywood, Kollywood, Tollywood, Malluwood, Sandalwood numbers), the iTunes Store also offers 30,000 TV episodes and 2,500 films including 600 in high definition video.

We’ve purchased a few Tamil and English songs from iTunes via our iPhone 3G through Wi-Fi and the process is amazingly simple and smooth.

Why Higher Prices
Most likely, Apple is under tremendous pressure from the music labels that are struggling to stay afloat. 

Apple uses the music in its iTunes store to feed its hungry iPods and iPhone 3G beasts, which are a healthy revenue and profit pipeline for the company.

But Apple products – be it the Mac computers or notebooks or the iPhones and iPods - are also pricey. Have always been.

The iTunes store was one of those cool exceptions where you could pick up a track you like for just 99-cents. Now it looks like that’s starting to fade off too.

And starting today, iTunes will offer eight million of its 10 million songs in Apple’s DRM-free format, iTunes Plus (at 256 kbps AAC encoding). The remaining two million songs are expected to go DRM-free by the end of March.