thomas fitzgerald.net

Imagine my surprise when this turned up in my RSS reader this morning….

“We’re extremely happy to announce we’ve launched a public beta of Amazon MP3, our new digital music service. You’re officially welcome to shop Earth’s biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 digital music downloads.”

There are tracks from more labels than just EMI, including songs from Universal Music. It should be noted that as they are high bit rate mp3 and with no DRM, the tracks will work in pretty much anything. Also note that “The Top 100″ individual songs are only 89cent compared to iTunes DRM’d songs at 99c or iTunes Plus tracks at €1.29. However older tracks range in price from 99c to $1.94. This appears to be depending on the length of the song. I guess this is an example of the variable pricing that the Labels have been pushing so much.

It is not clear just how wide the selection of music is but they claim that…

“We’ve got over 2 million songs by more than 180,000 artists from over 20,000 major and independent labels, so there’s plenty of great music to discover. Since our top 100 albums are priced at $8.99 and our top 100 songs are priced at 89 cents (unless marked otherwise, like, say, it’s a double album or something like that), you can score high-quality mp3s from artists like Kanye West, KT Tunstall and Spoon at low prices.”

A quick search reveals some reasonably high profile entries from a number of artists whose songs are not available DRM-free on iTunes.

Also interesting is that the service comes with a downloader application (Which is required for album purchases) that is available for both Mac and Windows and according to the site:

“..automatically adds your music downloads to iTunes or Windows Media Player”

This is also a first for a major iTunes competitor as most previous DRM’d music stores have been Windows only. If it does well, it could put pressure on Apple in the months ahead as it negotiates contracts with the record labels. Of course whether or not it is successful remains to be seen, but effective competition is always good for consumers in the long run.

Amazon MP3 is unfortunately US only at the moment (So I can’t test out the quality of the downloads). I guess it was too much to hope for a world wide service. Visit the site here.