Link

Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels -- Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group -- will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or DRM, which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, is already doing so.

In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

Instead, the majority of songs in the store will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

...
And with the copying restrictions removed, people will be able to freely shift the songs they buy on iTunes among all of their computers, phones and other digital devices, potentially changing the way they listen to music.

It's about time.

Apple said customers would be able to pay a one-time fee to strip copying restrictions from all of the music they have already bought on iTunes. The price is 30 cents a song or 30 percent of the album price. ITunes customers can achieve the same effect by burning all of their music to a CD and then reimporting the music to iTunes, although this reduces sound quality somewhat.

Ha! I'm supposed to give you money to remove the restrictions i never wanted in the first place that you placed on songs i own. Pfft!