Tech Shout!

Internet retailer Amazon became a rival as well as an ally to Apple as the company has announced that it plans to sell digital music on the Internet sans copy protection. Slated to open sometime later this year, Amazon’s digital music initiative will offer millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format.

Word has been going around for the last eight years that Amazon would be opening an online music store.

Bill Carr, vice president of digital media at Amazon, says the company has waited to launch a store because of the problems associated with DRM. “We’ve been patiently waiting to offer customers a great customer experience. DRM has been a bottleneck to enable that,” he says.

Amazon will now compete with Apple’s iTunes digital music store while siding with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in a campaign to eliminate digital rights management (DRM) software in digital songs.

Amazon customers will soon be able to play their music on virtually any personal device such as PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes and Zens. But that is not all. Users will also be able to burn their music collection on to CDs.

It has been a really long time for Apple who incidentally dominates the digital music scene. Like Amazon, the iPod maker also plans to begin selling music with no restrictions whatsoever in June 2007.

According to Apple, consumers hate buying music with copy protection, also known as DRM, because these songs cannot be played on many devices.

The only difference between Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s offering will be that unlike Apple, Amazon will be offering songs in the MP3 format. Apple’s DRM-free songs are in the AAC format, which is not really compatible with many devices.

As part of this deal, Amazon will also be partnering with records label EMI to offer millions of MP3-formatted songs for sale in an improved, premium format management protection.

You can expect over 12,000 record labels to be present in Amazon’s upcoming digital music store.