Exhibit A: The Virgin Digital music store will be shutting down shortly. Once the license lapses, you won’t be able to play all that music you bought. Another DRM proponent bites the dust.
Exhibit B: Amazon’s new Amazon MP3 music store. At $4.99 thru $9.99 for albums and $0.89 thru $0.99 for songs, it is the first non-theoretical non-bullshit use of variable pricing to always undercut or equal iTunes. At 256 kbps, you get sound fidelity that’s somewhere between iTunes and iTunes Plus (iTunes Plus songs also carry a 256 kbps bitrate, but are encoded in AAC - literally the successor to MP3) but at a lower price and in a more universal format (although you’d think the cavemen media players would have gotten AAC support by now). And with two million songs, a single policy of no DRM whatsoever and Windows and Mac clients that apparently don’t suck and only supplement your media players instead of trying to replace them, it’s hard not to rub your eyes.