For those of us who grew up dissecting lyrics and poring over liner notes, the new iTunes 9 introduces iTunes LP, a feature that allows users to download information along with albums. Photos, liner notes, album art, lyrics and extra content are available from artists such as The Doors, Dave Matthews Band and Norah Jones, who also performed at today’s event.

Making the biggest splash is the iPod Nano 5G, featuring a video camera, microphone, an FM tuner, voice recorder application and a pedometer. If you’re watching your wallet these days, the iPod Touch has dropped in price. The 8GB model now costs $199, what senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller calls a “magic price point.”

Marketing dudes and tech specs aside, who do you predict is going to be the next artist featured in the next Nano commercial? Remember last time? Or the time before?

Last time, we rang in the New Year with buzzworthy etherealists School Of Seven Bells, and this time we make our way to the world’s greatest metropolis.

Primarily known for Caroline Polachek’s distinctive woo-hoo-ing on a recent iPod TV ad (a hot-button issue these days thanks to the latest groundbreaking iTunes news), the Brooklyn-based, electronic pop three-piece, Chairlift, will soon be having Columbia Records (the label that just signed the act) doing a little woo-hoo-ing themselves.

The group, which also includes Aaron Pfenning and Patrick Wimberly (who cheekily accepted the Almost Famous honors on behalf of the group by declaring, “The cover of Rolling Stone. Crazy.”) gently separates themselves from other equally keyboard-y acts by with a distinctly organic sound. “Bruises,” their catchy iPod-popularized song from their Kanine debut, Does You Inspire You?, tells the tale of someone who does handstands until she’s black and blue, just to please another.

So you might say, just as Boy George and Culture Club once promised the then MTV-dominated music world, Chairlift wants to tumble for ya. (Ah, but without all the bad makeup, of course.)

Eight million songs are now available free of digital rights, with the remaining catalog of two million jams to be added in the next few months. By April, older songs will go for 69 cents per download, while newer, more popular songs will cost $1.29.

Now, none of this applies to you if you’re a master music pirate who’s been sailing the torrent seas. But those who frequent the iTunes store are now free to share songs with whoever and whatever devices they like, which is great since digital rights management always kind of sucked for consumers.

But this move speaks volumes about the ever-changing industry–even a seemingly untouchable music giant of the digital age like Apple has to bend its own pricing rules to adapt. In fact, since Apple is adapting, so will everyone else in the equation. Consumers will be paying more or less than they’re used to, and labels have to ease up on their long-held paranoia that unrestricted music will lead to increased piracy.

So what about the artists? While their music may be distributed more freely thanks to new found portability, they should really focus their efforts on cashing in via Apple’s iPod commercials.

However, Obama’s victory was not the only thing that gave me hope and pride in America.

The non-stop news coverage meant that each network had a lot of time to kill between polls closing and results coming in, which meant they had to fill that time with inane analysis, shots of Chicago and Phoenix and tons of high-tech toys, the latter providing for some of the most entertaining moments of the night.

CNN took the technology lead on TV. I was impressed with the 3D images of the Capitol building and the giant vote tabulator which seemed to act like a giant iPod. But the moment of the night was when they brought in Will.I.Am VIA HOLOGRAM!

Yes, that’s right, all that technology we saw in Star Wars is finally coming to fruition. They probably could have interviewed him on a split screen or whatever else they used for other commentators that night, but, no, for some reason a hologram was a way to go. Though Will.I.Am and Anderson Cooper both laughed at the technology, it’s clear that this is a new step forward for America and the news reporting networks. A new day IS dawning in America: a day of holograms!

Girl Talk’s latest release, Feed The Animals, was released online a few months ago in a pay-what-you-want model. A physical version of the record will be released on October 21. Like many, I downloaded the record from Illegal Art’s website and I’m not afraid to admit I didn’t pay a cent for it. (I actually downloaded it twice–once I lied by picking the humorous response, “I don’t really like Girl Talk” and confessed to being a member of the press the other time).

I’ve seen the whole pay-what-you-want idea praised for innovation both in terms of a sales model and a technological achievement. Isn’t a big part of technology advance supposed to be the fact that it makes things easier, quicker and simpler?

When Girl Talk’s previous album, Night Ripper, was released I got a copy on CD, threw it into my portable CD player and started listening as I walked out the door. Feed The Animals wasn’t quite so easy. After waiting for the tracks to download, which took maybe 15-30 minutes, I had to connect my iPod, wait for iTunes to load, tell it, “No, I don’t want to upgrade to 8.0 right now,” import those Girl Talk tracks into iTunes, drop them onto my iPod, wait for it to disconnect and then grab my music to take with me on the train.

As a music writer, the situation can be even more daunting. The other day I finally downloaded a copy of a new album that had been sitting in my inbox for about a month; I don’t even want to think about how long things sit that I’m not excited about–sometimes the links to downloads even expire before I get the chance to check them out.

The time it takes to download multiple albums can be daunting (clogging up them tubes of the internets), and some servers can be painfully slow. Considering in the same amount of time I can plop a CD or two into a player, listen to a few songs (or just the beginnings of a few songs if it’s truly terrible), and make a judgment about exploring the record further, the CD is once again more convenient.

I don’t mean to sound like a luddite here. I like having my iPod with me when I ride the subway; I can listen to a vast number of albums, play Sonic: The Hedgehog and watch the first season of Moral Orel thanks to a little box smaller than my wallet. Perhaps I am sacrificing time and ease at the expense of quantity, the ability to access not just one album of songs but a plethora of albums, games, movies and TV shows.