This year, Amazon.com plans to begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, the company's DRM-free MP3 digital music store. Currently the only digital music store to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels, Amazon MP3 launched in September 2007 and now offers over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Amazon did not disclose a specific launch timeline for individual Amazon international websites. If you ask me, Apple better go completely DRM-free quickly or iTunes will slowly begin to feel the wrath of a real competitor.
Every song (most priced from 89 cents to 99 cents) and album (most priced from $5.99 to $9.99) in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management software and is encoded at 256 kbps. Pricing for Amazon MP3 international websites is currently unclear. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
"We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can't wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future. We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music.
It's not like they have a choice here.
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