Hey, great news for independent music fans: not only was yesterday's invitation-only meeting of indie label reps at Apple's headquarters not a trap dreamt up by the majors to lure their up-and-coming competitors to a mayonnaisey grave, but it also revealed that Apple is stone cold serious about ensuring that the iTunes Music Store can offer its users a richer selection of tunage than just bland prefab stuff manufactured for maximum consumption. Oh, don't worry-- if you happen to like bland prefab stuff manufactured for maximum consumption, the iTMS will still offer it, so more power to you. But if your tastes are slightly more off-center, you ought to be smiling (and spending) more at the iTMS in maybe six more months or so.

How serious is Apple about signing up the indies? Serious enough to send a reality-distortin' Steve Jobs smack dab into the middle of the 150-rep cluster to prime the pump. That's right, folks; whereas Stevenotes are typically more of a stadium show, those lucky slobs got the Jobsian equivalent of a small club gig-- and judging by one review, at least, the man brought down the house. As faithful viewer newwavedave pointed out to us, the rep from CD Baby took notes at the meeting and appears to be sold, sold, sold.

Even if you have absolutely zippo interest in indie music, it behooves you to check out those notes, because they include a bunch of nifty iTMS stats that, as far as we know, have yet to surface elsewhere. Reportedly the current sales count is at 3.5 million, with approximately half a million songs selling per week; not bad, considering there are only "6-7 million copies of iTunes in use." Over three quarters of the songs offered have sold at least once, and nine out of ten sales are made via One-Click. (Long live the Impulse Buy!) And then there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff about the iTMS from the other side of the transaction. You already know that it's ridiculously easy to buy music from the iTMS, but what it's like to sell it?

Well, apparently, that's pretty darn straightforward, too. Of particular note is the fact that Apple isn't playing any favorites, majors-vs.-indies-wise. Indies are being offered the exact same deal as the Big Five: as Steve puts it, "Same deal. Same agreements. Same team of people. Same treatment, all-around." It costs nothing for a label to add music to the iTMS. Every artist in the store gets artist and album pages, and is listed in New Releases. Apple handles all the merchandising, advertising, credit card transactions, backend infrastructure, etc.; all the labels have to do is encode the music (using a special Mac OS X Music Store Encoder to be released in a few months), enter the song/artist/album info, upload it all, and cash the monthly checks. Oh, and pass some of the cash onto the artists themselves, of course.

Now, we're not record execs, but that all sounds pretty attractive to us. With any luck, then, plenty of these indies will be falling all over themselves to sign on the dotted line. Artists get their work in front of the eyes (er, ears) of a much wider audience than they probably have now, labels get paid, regular shmoes like us get to broaden our horizons at 99 cents a pop, and everybody lived happily ever after.

That is, until the flesh-eating space locusts came.