What's new ...
- Playlist publishing; this is called "iMix"
- Free Single of the week
- iTMS will sell Music Videos
- Movie Trailers are now downloadable from iTMS as well
- Something called "Radio Charts" which lets you see the most popular songs played on real radio stations in the U.S.
- Printing of CD inserts from inside iTunes
- Importing of WMA files (non-protected only)
- Lossless AAC encoding (!)
- Links to go directly from your Music Library, to the iTMS to (apparently) get artist info, other songs, etc.
I think that the DRM changes are very telling of Apple's attitude toward the service. They saw people using things like PlayFair to break their DRM, and what did they do? Did they clamp down with an iron fist? No, they concluded that these things were popular because people had more computers than authorization allowed to play music. That's a smart move.
Now I know that some people will never be happy until they can get the music they want in a non-DRM format, but that will never happen. DRM is a reality in the music business, at this point, and it won't go anywhere. So all we can hope for is that the DRM stays non-intrusive and reasonable. Apple's DRM is by far, the most transparent, and they're the company that's most in touch with what music lovers want, which is not to be treated like criminals.
