Apple negotiating for unlimited iTunes music downloads

Although I agree with all the posts here, this is a no brainer. However can you here the record industry on this: "hey we don't replace all your CDs (or records) if they are stolen, do we?"

I'm shocked that we didn't already have this ability; that's just a basic courtesy, considering we already paid for the track. It's utterly disgusting and disgraceful, what the Old Guard of the music industry will stoop to. I can't wait to see them gone.

On another note, THANK YOU for using the real iTunes icon instead of that abominable eyesore for once. It still ticks me off that Apple not only outsourced their design work to their janitor's 14-year-old kid who'd just torrented his first copy of Photoshop, but then had the nerve to trumpet it far and wide as if their mistake didn't make them sick to their stomachs. (Then again, this is the iTunes department we're talking about — they stopped caring about making good products years ago.)

You can't just click the Buy button again, and then they say "You already purchased this item..."? They do that for apps, and I've done it for music before, too.

the iTunes logo is outdated, there's a new one now. and this image of iTunes in a cloud was stolen from MacDaddyNews dot com.

For Christmas, I picked up a 2 TB external hard drive, which is used for backups. I have one patition of the drive as a Time Machine backup, and the other is my iTunes backup. I have a 750 GB external which hosts my iTunes library. I use SilverKeeper to backup my music since CCC can't handle FAT32-formatted disks. (I use FAT32 because I need read/write ability on both Windows and OS X.)

This basically give Apple a digital locker solution. As long as your iTunes account doesn't get corrupted you would always have access to your digital wares. I could see a day in the near future where you could buy a new iphone, ipad or mac and just enter your apple ID and it will download and install all your apps, media and files from the cloud. This would be a very welcome solution for anyone that has ever had to replace a device while traveling.

Would this potential new feature allow users to transfer songs/movies from one device to another through Home Sharing?

this is one of the major reasons I seldom buy music on iTunes and opt for a CD instead. If I suffer from a HDD failure at least i still have access to the original. But if that was to change I would think twice before ordering CDs online. But I too would like to see them increase the bit rate of their entire music catalog.

I've been using iTunes thinking I had this ability already... WTF

I am currently in a battle with iTunes right now over this specific issue. My laptop bag was stolen, and my iTunes library harddrive was in the the bag. I lost 10 years worth of purchased, legit music that I paid for. iTunes offered to replace a portion of my music, but used the excuse that many items were "modified" in the iTunes store and could not be replaced (hundreds and hundreds of songs/tv shows). They went on to list every item that could not be downloaded again.

I wrote back an email questioning why it was that a loyal Apple customer and iTunes adopter was being denied access to content he legally and legitimately paid for. I'll keep TUAW posted with how this situation is resolved and I think it would be a great article to feature in the blog. I am a former Apple employee and hope that they will use this as an example for the future of taking care of their customers who buy confidently from iTunes despite the many other options out there (Rhapsody, Amazon Music etc.).
Owning my music should mean I should have access to download it as many times as I want. Otherwise, subscriptions services like Rhapsody make it clear that the iTunes ecosystem is extremely flawed and inconvenient for users who pay to own content.