Apple has announced major changes to the iTunes Store in its keynote speech at the MacWorld show in San Francisco, including making it entirely DRM-free by the end of March. That story on CNET yesterday was pretty bang on, it turns out.Eight million of the 10 million tracks on the store have been switched to DRM-free iTunes Plus versions today, including songs from all four major labels. The other two million will follow in the coming months. They’ll all be encoded as 256kbps AAC files, not MP3s.Apple is also abandoning its fixed pricing model. From April, there will be three prices for music tracks: $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29. Apple says which songs cost what will be determined by “what the music labels charge Apple”. The company says “most” albums will still cost $9.99, and that “many more songs” will cost $0.69 than $1.29.There’ll be an easy upgrade option for iTunes users to convert every song they’ve bought from iTunes in the past into DRM-free versions for $0.30 a song, or 30% of an album price.Finally, the iPhone’s iTunes Store will now work over 3G as well as Wi-Fi, enabling users to buy songs over the air. The feature will work from today. Previously, iPhone users could only buy music from iTunes when they were on a Wi-Fi connection.Otherwise, the keynote was low on startling hardware announcements. The hormonally imbalanced Steve Jobs picked a good keynote to miss, leaving Apple’s senior VP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller to focus mainly on Mac software, including iPhoto, iMovie and iWork.The ’09 incarnation of GarageBand was shown off, although Schiller only talked about one new feature in depth. It’s called Learn to Play, where you get lessons in how to play guitar – with a video instructor sitting above music notation, and a virtual guitar or piano keyboard below.There’ll be nine basic lessons for guitar and nine for piano, with the ability to download new lessons from celebrities, including Sting, John Fogarty, Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan and Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy, with more to be added throughout the year. They’ll cost $4.99 each to download, offering a new music-based revenue stream for Apple.GarageBand ’09 will ship at the end of this month, as part of Apple’s iLife package.Schiller also announced a new 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop, which claimed to be the world’s thinnest and lightest 17-inch laptop with a stonking battery life. Oh, and antique crooner Tony Bennett appeared on-stage to perform live.
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