It may have taken Amazon a few years, but they got it right: their new music store is DRM free and songs, starting at $0.89/track, are cheaper than at Apple’s iTunes. The top 100 best-selling albums are priced no higher than $8.99.
Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI is on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.
A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news - DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.
Average quality is very high - 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.
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