Apple has announced that it will be standardizing the prices of music on the European iTunes service over the next six months.

This means that the UK iTunes store will be dropping its prices to match those found in areas such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain.

The higher prices in the UK stores have been attributed to the fact that Apple has to pay some record labels to distribute its music in UK. To deal with this, the company has given word that they will reconsider its relationship with any record label that does not lower the wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level.

This is a pretty big move by Apple and we'd like to leave you with a few words from Steve Jobs himself regarding this development: "This is an important step towards a pan-European marketplace for music. We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing."