There’s no way for the public to know for certain, and I’m sure they’re not going to say a word until WWDC, but the success of iTunes Plus—Apple’s DRM-free music offering with EMI announced last month—seems to be too much for the iTunes server cluster to handle. Even late into the evening, navigating through the iTunes Store is taking much longer than usual, and song previews are frequently stalling while waiting for the servers to catch up.

Honestly, I don’t know if I’d have it any other way. The geek community’s been demanding DRM-free content for years, and it looks like the recording industry and electronics industries are finally starting to listen.

Ars Technica noticed similar iTunes slowdowns while reviewing the new service. I suspect that music upgrades will work more smoothly as Apple increases server capacity and/or the rush slows down somewhat.

In other news, Apple parted $9.99 from me for my first online music purchase ever. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?