Once the bane of recording executives everywhere, downloadable music has finally come of age. Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs has found a common ground between the notoriously conservative record labels and the Napster generation – and in the process has created a music sales model for the 21st Century.

The record labels rightly opposed the Napster revolution and its descendents – services that existed solely to facilitate the stealing of songs. But in their righteous crusade to crush the Napsters of the world, the labels became short-sighted, vacillating between fearing all digital music schemes and supporting only ones that were crippled by either absurdly high prices or user-hostile digital rights management features.

Apple’s Music Store, which is built into its popular iTunes jukebox software, both improves on the Napster experience and leaves other legal music services in the dust when it comes to freedom and selection.

The songs Apple sells for a mere 99¢ are professionally encoded in the high-quality AAC format, and as such sound far better than the amateur-encoded MP3 files found on swapping servers. The clean and attractive Store interface means less hunting around for the song you want. Search and click, and you’re ready to go. With the push of one button, the song is yours.

And that’s where the service stands heads and shoulders above its legal rivals – ownership. Songs purchased from Apple can be played on up to three Macs, burned to CD-Rs and synced with as many iPod music players as your heart desires. Other legal services have disallowed common functions such as burning, or require a monthly service charge to be able to listen to your downloaded songs. Apple has eschewed such nonsense.

The service isn’t perfect – on the service’s first day the iTunes servers were so overwhelmed that it was almost impossible to get in, and the selection is so far wide but not deep (though more music is being added every week). It’s also not yet available for Windows. But given the success of the iTunes store on Macs – over 3 million songs sold in the first month – disallowing a Windows version would be leaving money on the table. That’s not the kind of stupid move the record labels are likely to make.

So PC users can expect their shot at the service before the end of this year, after Apple brings iTunes to Windows.

Steve Jobs has music labels finally whistling a new tune when it comes to the digital domain – a tune that not only serves this broad new market, but also protects the interests of all involved – label, musician and customer. And that should be music to all of our ears