After Googling this question a couple times, I thought I would make it easier to find the answer. The answer is yes, but not all songs. You can tell by the words “iTunes Plus” above the buy now button.

I found it particularly interesting that there was a button on the iTunes store homepage prompting me to “upgrade” to iTunes Plus. When I clicked it I was given the generous opportunity to buy the tracks AGAIN for a seemingly random price. For instance, I could upgrade the 12 tracks on A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms for $3.56, the 12 tracks on Audioslave’s Out of Exile for $3.00, and the 13 tracks on Matthew Good’s Avalanche for $2.40. At first, I assumed this was the new variable pricing model, but each track on each album was listed for $0.99 cents. So go figure.

I love the idea of DRM-free music. I just bought Mudvayne’s new album aptly titled The New Game, the first from iTunes since buying a vehicle with an MP3 player. However, it annoys me that I have to pay again to get the DRM taken off my existing purchases. Yes, I can strip the DRM myself, but that is a pain compared to just swiping the album via bittorrent.

So I was excited to see the Great 80s Hair Band in what I thought would be a “past-their-prime” type of show.

I vastly underestimated the utter adoration of Bon Jovi fans. The audience cross-section included a good amount of eighties cougars, suburban parents with babysitters at home, DINKs, an 8-year-old boy with his parents and a gramma where also sitting in our row. Can you say big demographic?

When the show started it was a head-spinning, literally arena-shaking explosion of love and lust for Jon and Co. Tico Torres walked on stage to thundering applause. Then David “the-curly-haired-keyboard-dude” Bryan entered to shrieks of glee. Richie “Shiny-dentures” Sambora’s entry would seem to have maxed out the volume of an arena. Then the mere video of Jon-jon drew unmanageable volume. He burst through the door of the highway-diner stage set to easily the most psychotic applause I have ever been deafened by.

Jon Bon Jovi could quite possibly be the biggest brand in media today. I have never witnessed such command of an audience, one that was gushing with love for this guy. I would go so far as to say he is the Elvis Presley of our generation.

They also played much more “new stuff” than I expected. Unlike say, an Aerosmith concert where “new stuff” is just filler for their few hits, Bon Jovi has an extremely strong and large fan-base for their recent work and in particular their current record Lost Highway.

The newer “country-ish” work is not really my cup of scotch (I was wearing a KSE t-shirt).

My new employer is Filemobile, a social networking platform and CMS technology company that is truly Web 2.0 savvy.

FileMobile was recently featured on the highly influential tech news-maker blog, TechCrunch.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was recently described in Wired Magazine as “being among the most influential — and quite possibly the richest — business writers in Silicon Valley.”

This was a very good sign indeed for the King West Village startup whose client list includes the iconic Canadian media companies MuchMusic and CBC.

My blog will continue to focus on new media companies, ideas, trends, entertainment and all manner of things that interest me and hopefully others in and out of the media business.