[smacktoward]

I knew someone was going to pick this nit :-D I just feared overloading an already-herniated comment with additional verbiage. Sorry about that.

For the record: yes, if you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store today, it is most likely DRM-free. However, people who have been active ITMS customers over the years are likely to have purchased at least some DRM-encumbered tracks before Apple moved away from DRM.

[chipotle_coyote]

While it is a nit, it's actually an interesting nit if you follow the trail a little. The most significant problems with the modern Internet, I think, come from the "walled gardens" that DRM creates -- and DRM is almost entirely the fault of media publishers rather than distributors. Apple gets a lot of fingers pointed at it, but I honestly don't think Apple -- or Amazon, for that matter -- really cares about DRM one way or the other. If the movie and television studios or the book publishers said tomorrow, "We want you to drop all the DRM from your files," I doubt Apple would stand in their way any more than they did with the music publishers.

Ironically, it's Apple's dominance in the music distribution market that led to record labels wanting to drop DRM, because they realized it was the only way to loosen the vise grip they'd inadvertently given Apple on their balls. Eventually the same thing will happen with books due to Amazon. Video is going to be the really tough nut to crack, though.

(Incidentally, if you turn on iTunes Match, it will let you replace all your remaining DRM-encumbered tracks with the DRM-free and higher quality ones, even ones that for arcane reasons weren't eligible for the $0.30/track upgrade. That, combined with switching my remaining MP3s to AAC -- yes, I think the quality's a little better -- made it worth the price for me, at least for a year.)

[mitchty]

All itunes tracks are drm free. And you can upgrade any drm tracks for $0.30c a track. Basically the difference that the labels wanted for everything to be $1.29 versus $0.99 which Apple wanted things to stay at.

This has been true since 2009 for the record.