I should have paid more attention to the announcement that Apple and Apple (meaning, The Beatles) had come to an agreement. I yawned, and thought it just meant that beatles music would be available in iTunes. Nope - this is a fairly big change for Apple:

Apple was prevented from doing this until now by the 15-year-old contract between Apple Corps, the Beatles' music company, and Apple Computer. This contract precluded Jobs' Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or "physical media delivering prerecorded content ... (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones' music)."

That means iPods pre-filled with music - an opportunity for the labels that they'll probably see as a threat, given their inabilityy to think outside the box (but I digress). Wired talks about pre-loaded iPods, but this is going to be a lot more than that - Apple has a chance to define the next format after the CD (think flash sticks that plug into the iPod's USB port). The downside: this format, like the DVD, is going to come with DRM.

Technorati Tags: iPod, DRM