Pitchfork

As reported on CNET and confirmed on MediaMemo, Apple announced some changes to the iTunes Music Store today at its MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. The big news is Apple will now be selling music free of digital rights management. Right now, most of the music for sale on iTunes can only be played on five devices. That means that if you get the sad face on a few iPods, the tracks you downloaded from iTunes will stop playing on your new iPods after a little while, which is kind of a pain in the ass. Late in 2007, Apple started selling DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks, but the only one of the five major labels to go along with the deal was EMI. But now all the major labels are on board, along with "thousands of independent labels." Bonus: The DRM-free iTunes files will now come with higher-quality 256 kpbs encoding. And you'll be able to upgrade your old music files to iTunes Plus for 30 cents a song or 30% of the album price. Plus you'll be able to put those songs on as many iPods as you want. You can even put them on Zunes, I guess. The world is yours.

The other bit of news is a bit more troubling: Starting in April, iTunes will drop their blanket policy of charging 99 cents for any and all songs (or any and all songs under 10 minutes, anyway). The new pricing system will have three tiers: Songs will cost 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. Major labels have been trying to get iTunes to switch up that 99-cents-only policy for years and now they've finally caved. So maybe it doesn't matter that much whether you're paying 99 cents or $1.29 for "Single Ladies", but these things add up over time. Meanwhile, it's kind of fun to speculate what horrible bullshit they'll be charging 69 cents for.

Also, if you've got an iPhone 3G, now you can buy music over the 3G network instead of just over wireless. Don't go too crazy now.