by SHANE SINNOTT

2009 greets us with the news that Apple has finally—finally—removed the DRM from its iTunes store downloads. This is as good a moment as any to pronounce the death of digital rights management in music. You’ll now be able to burn and play iTunes files on as many devices as you like, bringing the store purchases exactly up to speed, use-wise, with the physical formats they’re supposed to replace. The announcement comes about two years after Apple honcho Steve Jobs issued an open letter to record labels calling for the end of DRM, and after just about everybody else in the game—Amazon, Yahoo Music, Wal-Mart—has already done so. No reason to heap too much praise on Apple here, but they tend to play the role that the porn industry does for video formats: whatever they go with sticks. Consider DRM dead.

The first big leak of the year has arrived as well. Morrissey’s Years of Refusal, slated for release on Feb. 16. I have to agree with the general online consensus—it’s decent, and certainly more so than the average 50-year-old’s record. You can download the first track, “Something Is Squeezing My Skull,” at tinyurl.com/9fn9wo. It’s trademark Morrissey, the driving hook, upbeat melody and crazy, depressing lyrics. The chorus: “Something is squeezing my skull/something I can barely describe/there is no love in modern life.”

I also had a chance over the holidays to try the Mac version of TuneUp (tuneupmedia.com), which promised to completely fix all the titles, artists, covers etc. in your iTunes music collection. It works pretty damn well. By taking a “digital signature” of a song, it figures out precisely what it is and about 95 per cent of the time, tags it accordingly. No more artists called “01. The Hymn-~89” for you. What it is not is fast—it is soooooo fucking slow. It crashes a lot and generally makes your computer run like ass during the eons it takes to determine your track info. But it’s all worth it ’cause they’ve figured out a way to magically clean up your music collection which, face it, you were never, ever going to do.