Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"If you've been skipping the daily double-wet-cappuccino in order to save enough money to upgrade your iTunes library to the DRM-free iTunes Plus format, you can put coffee back on the menu. Apple has dispensed with the iTunes Store all-or-nothing upgrade policy."

A welcome change to say the least. You can still "buy all" or just go down the list and purchase upgrades individually. I wasn't about to upgrade the Hannah Montana song (my 14 year old daughter bought it, honest!) but I definitely wanted to upgrade some others.

"Apple's iTunes Store is almost completely DRM-free, and will be entirely DRM-free from spring," Nate Lanxon reports for CNET. "This means files downloaded from iTunes work on heaps of devices that aren't from Apple."

Just make sure the music you are now able to share doesn't end up on a file-sharing network, because the DRM-free files contain your email address used when you purchased the music. Maybe this was a payoff to the RIAA, who knows, but it is the one warning in the article. The rest of the article is a pretty good summation of what iTunes Plus means to the average consumer. I love the fact they are doing this, will make my sharing of files (at home only among family of course!) so much easier.

"Apple Inc. is cutting the price of some songs in its market-leading iTunes online music store to 69 cents and plans to begin selling all tracks without copy protection."

Started over 6 years ago, the iTunes Store has become the go-to place for music. Read more...