Apple announced today that they're dropping DRM from all of their music. I honestly haven't bought anything from them since Amazon started selling plain old MP3's. But I still have a fair amount of iTunes tracks that are locked down to the Apple ecosystem.
Honestly, it never really got in the way for me, save for the odd times here and there where I wanted to give Diana a song to use on her iPod without having to sync it to my comprooder (which as far as I'm concerned is just like loaning a CD). But I've always hated the idea that if one day Apple decided to turn off their authorization service, my files would be useless. And the tools that stripped DRM (on the Mac anyway) have been ineffective since v6, so I couldn't even cheat my way into files I can truly own.
They said 80% of the library is now DRM free as of today, and the rest by the end of the quarter. Naturally, they're allowing you to "upgrade" your files (which is partially true, because at least they're encoded at 256k instead of 128k). iTunes says they can do 221 of my songs for about $55, or a quarter a piece.
Will I pay it? Yeah, probably. I don't like it, but I'll do what I gotta do to finally "own" the files I paid for, and continue buying from Amazon in the future.
Again, I've never really been annoyed with Apple over this, and I doubt online music sales would exist at all has they not worked out the initial deal with the record companies. The music industry should be kissing Apple's ass for saving theirs. But I'm still annoyed that I have to pay a little more to free all of those files.
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