The thing is, that Apple failing would send a message to other online music vendors and entertainment industry that the public does not really care about DRM and that there is nothing to be gained by offering non-crippled music.

And every time we complain about it they will just point to Apple and say something among the lines of:

“Hey, we tried - we really, really tried. We went out of our way, took huge financial risks and gave you burnable music via iTunes. It’s not cost effective. But no one was buying them because these tracks were immediately pirated and we lost millions. Sorry but never again.”

If apple has poor sales numbers on the DRM-free tracks, every copyright natzi in the industry will be claiming that this is because of piracy. Hell, they don’t even have to fail - all they have to do to make this into a pro-DRM example is to have sales that are just slightly average in the first quarter.