Finally, for sanity's sake, how's about we take a quick break from the incessant Stevenote speculation and kick back with a little iTunes Music Store action instead? By most accounts, Apple's foray into the wild and woolly world of online downloadable music sales has been a rousing success; there are still a few warts on the service, true, but every indication is that Apple has popped open an industrial size can of Compound W and is getting busy with the wart-busting action even as we speak.

For example, one typical complaint is that the selection at the iTMS skews heavily mainstream-- which isn't terribly surprising, since every single song in the current catalog comes from one of the five major labels. But it wasn't long before Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be courting the independent labels next, and so Stevie went a-courtin' by inviting representatives of some 150 indie labels to One Infinite Loop. One such rep posted his notes from the meeting ("NDA? What NDA?") which revealed just how excited he was with the terms of Apple's offer-- and now Rolling Stone reports that he wasn't alone in his giddiness. The co-founder of Sub Pop is "psyched," while the president of Delvian says, "I was waiting the whole time to find out, 'Where is the catch?' So far, there hasn't been any."

Ah. So no one told him about the shave-your-head-and-paint-it-reflective-orange clause, then. Well, he'll find out eventually.

Shiny orange heads aside, though, Apple is listening; when the rep from Vagrant Records (our personal fave, by the way) expressed concern that the iTMS can only sell to credit card holders, Apple reportedly replied that it was looking into "stored-value cash cards teens could use for music purchases." That's not just good news to labels with a younger demographic; it's also good news to parents who made the mistake of letting their kids go shopping with One-Click enabled and now have 8,200 individual 99-cent purchases on last month's Visa bill. See? Continual wart removal: an Apple way of life.