A long time in the making and wrestling with record companies has finally paid off for Apple.  It seems Apple has finally won the battle of DRM-free downloads on the iTunes store.  

"The deal reported by sources speaking to CNET News.com would see Apple break its longtime insistence on a fixed per-track rate for songs and give in to frequent demands from Sony, Universal and Warner that would change the pricing depending on the popularity and recentness of a given song."

An announcement will probably be made tomorrow at the MacWorld Expo as one would expect.  To go along with such a deal are sources reporting that AT&T and Apple have reached an agreement which would allow us to further use our bandwidth we pay for every month on the iPhone.  This means we will be able to download iTunes songs via 3G and hopefully podcasts larger than 10MB, which most already are.

We hope to hear more details on this news and more tomorrow at MacWorld.

[via AppleInsider]

  Without question, the App Store has been an unbelievable success.  In a mere 5 months since the store entered existence, they have hit the 300 million mark.  It is hard to believe that there would be this kind of success on even an Apple product, let alone anything else in this short time frame.  The great thing about the popularity of the App Store is the capitalistic model can only bring better and better apps for us all to enjoy. With over 10,000 apps now available and that number increasing ever day, Apple is sure to hit 1 Billion next year.