Amazon’s long awaited DRM-free online music store launched today. The service is called Amazon MP3. There’s an estimated 2 million MP3 files there, for the low price of 89 or 99 cents each. I tried it out and am happy to report that there were four CocoRosie albums available for sale there – the desktop downloader worked well on my MacBook (see image below), the shopping experience was very simple and I’m looking forward to transferring the songs over to my other computer.
This is definitely a service I’ll use when I want to buy whole albums and can’t make it down to the local, independent record store. I’ve always felt dirty buying music from iTunes, now I think I’ll feel a little less dirty buying DRM free music from Amazon. I saw the news first at Techmeme and there’s good music-industry centric coverage at Steven Finch’s Crenk. See a longer, more in-depth review of the new service over at our digital lifestyle blog Last100.
