beaTunes News

Great news for iTunes users! Today Amazon went public with a beta version of their new MP3 shop dubbed Amazon MP3. The new service has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. All files are 256kbps encoded DRM-free MP3s - which basically means they play in iTunes, on iPods, Zunes and pretty much any other player out there. According to the Amazon press release, most songs are priced between $0.89 and $0.99. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99.

For beaTunes users this means that they can now buy tracks at a decent price electronically without running into the DRM trap. This comes only a few months after Apple introduced a limited offering of DRM-free tracks to their music store for the premium price of $1.29 per track.

For both technical and legal reasons beaTunes cannot analyze the raw audio of DRM protected files.

Labels: Amazon, DRM