Amazon.com has announced that it will launch a digital music store later this year that will offer all its content in the DRM-free MP3 format. It will offer music from some 12,000 record labels, including EMI which announced last month that it would offer its catalog in DRM-free formats. Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes, Zens — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.
A number of details are still not clear. We still don’t know exactly when the service will launch, how much songs will go for, and what bit rate will be used to encode the songs.
The fact that Amazon will offer songs in MP3 does give it an edge over iTunes which plans to continue to use its AAC format which is supported by fewer devices.