Apple is cutting the price of its one-gigabyte iPod Shuffle, from $69 to $49, and announced that a two-gigabyte version will be available later that month for $69. “At just $49, the iPod shuffle is the most affordable iPod ever,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod product marketing. “The new 2GB model lets music lovers bring even more songs everywhere they go in the impossibly small iPod shuffle.”

Even at under $50, Apple is “printing money” with flash-based MP3 players, a commenter on the Ars Technica site said. Indeed, low-end MP3 players are starting to look like USB drives — products “where the price of production is so small considering of the drastic drop in technology costs that companies will start delivering these things at breath-taking prices,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in a telephone interview.

The price cuts may additionally be a reflection that the iPod is now a mature

product no longer able to command premium pricing, at least at the low end. “The music market is starting to fracture and Apple will be seeing increased competition. It’s going to get ugly out there,” King said.

As CD sales keep dropping precipitously, it’s clear that the music market is rapidly moving online. “Apple’s had a great run, but the global market is going to get pretty interesting,” King said, as more players like Amazon.com compete with Apple.

But even though Apple’s monopoly in music sales is probably by, the overall size of the online business will grow substantially, King said. The online music ecosystem has already provided consumers with “ready availability to a far more diverse range of music and enabled bands that would never had been signed by a label to find a place online,” he added. “I think that’s great, but it has society in…

Orginal post by Top Tech News