We have great news for all music consumers out there.

Apple Inc. has announced that it plans to bid farewell to DRM for good. This was actually the most important announcement made in the usual keynote addressed by the company’s management.

This time it wasn’t Steve Jobs delivering the keynote, which poured gasoline on the fire of rumors about the Apple legendary CEO, and although it did not introduce a revolutionary new Mac mini or an iPhone nano, the company’s senior vice president Phil Schiller did made some important announcements at the Macworld Expo.

The most important of them was the company’s decision to make important changes to its iTunes Store. The short version of the announcement regarding this issue is that Apple’s music and video download service (more than 10 million tunes) is going Digital Rights Management-free.

During the past six years, Apple had record earnings by selling most of its music through iTunes at the price of 99 cents with DRM. Financially speaking, it was a great period for the company as its iPods are now holding nearly 75% of the digital music market, while iTunes store is the largest vendor of music in the U.S.

Why is Apple implementing this change?

Well, over the past 5 to 6 years the digital music was being sold with DRM and that was just the way things were. But the DRM policy was and is considered restrictive by consumers and the single price point irritated most the music labels who would like to change the price according to the request rate of the song. This opened the door for competition on the digital music market. For example, Amazon.com is already selling DRM-free music and does not have the single point price.

That became history. Starting today, consumers can purchase more than 8 million tracks without DRM and by the end of this year’s fiscal quarter, the company will offer its entire 10 million tracks free of DMR for sale. 

iTunes users now have the option of upgrading their current library to the higher-quality, DRM-free format for 30 cents a song. In April, Apple said it plans to introduce variable pricing for its music. The price points will be 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29. All three pricing points will be DRM-free.

However, Apple still encodes the tracks it sells using the AAC format so they won’t play on several phones, PDAs or MP3 players. But do not worry. It’s quite easy to convert the DRM-free versions of songs into an MP3 format which practically works on everything.

To convert the track from the AAC format into MP3 simply click the iTunes Plus song and choose Create MP3 Version. It will take a minute or so and iTunes will provide you with an MP3 copy of the desired track.