So the rumours of Apple buying Vivendi were wrong, but they did lead to a different music avenue for Apple. Apple has just openned its iTunes Music Store. It's tag line is "Downloads Done Right" and it does live up to it. The iTunes Music Store doesn't have all the gotchas that Sony's pressPlay or other digital music stores up till now have had. You don't join a club and pay monthly fees, the songs are 99 cents a piece and come encoded 128 kbps in AAC format. You can also buy a full album for $9.99 (no matter how many songs are on the album). They have 200,000 songs online, from major labels, and all of them are for sale. The songs can be burned to CDs (no limit to which songs can or can't be burned), played on other Macs, and even moved to your iPod. Pretty damn cool idea and great execution (just like how Apple operates). It's easy to use for everyone. Now if all digital music stores would follow this example, then this whole KaZaA and peer-to-peer sharing thing would diminish greatly. For now though, all you Windows users are out of luck since iTunes Music Store is only available for Macintosh users -- though Apple promises a Windows version soon.