Amazon will continue to turn up the heat against Apple’s iTunes service in 2008 as it announced plans to expand its Amazon MP3 service to other countries. Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music, Bill Carr, said that Amazon has received thousands of emails from customers asking to make the service available outside of the United States. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year,” he said.
Launched in September 2007, Amazon MP3 now carries over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player; and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
Details about specific timelines and countries have not been disclosed by Amazon yet.