It took them long enough...

After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format.

The releases are part of an experiment to gauge demand for tracks that can be played on any digital music player capable of playing MP3s, one of the oldest music compression formats.

I covered my thoughts on why I refuse to buy products that include digital rights management here some time ago.  This is very good news.  Hopefully they'll expand the number of artists this covers beyond Jessica Simpson and Nora Jones soon.  I mean really... Jessica Simpson?  At least Christina Aguilera has a set of pipes on her worth listening too, and now she's decided to become stylish again and dropped the whole ghetto image.