Amazon’s new music store is now open and offering over 2 million songs from artists like KT Tunstell, 50 Cent, and the Rolling Stones. Every song and album is in the MP3 format, the most universal format for digital music, and can be played on nearly every device on the market from the iPod to the BlackBerry. 
The songs are priced from 89 to 99 cents and encoded at 256 kilobits per second.
It will be interesting to see whether iTunes will meet these prices. When it announced this spring that iTunes would offer EMI’s catalog of music DRM* free, it was with a catch. The DRM free music would be offered at a higher price - $1.29 instead of $.99.
Hopefully the competitive pricing Amazon is offering will put pressure on iTunes to offer DRM without the premium pricetag.
Via Press Release.
*DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is a piece of computer code which ties the song or book to a single device. I.e., iTunes music can only be played on an iPod device or through iTunes.
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