Amazon MP3 starts going global this year

According to an official press release, Amazon MP3 will begin to offer its service globally this year. The company claims to be responding to thousands of emails from international customers, asking when the DRM-free MP3 store will open in their country.

While the press release states, that Amazon will start the international rollout this year, it does not give dates for individual countries, nor does it list the countries in which a store will actually open.

So even though the press release is somewhat preemptive - in the sense that it really only promises that at least one non-US store will open this year - this is very promising news for Amazon's international customers.

Since beaTunes can only analyze DRM-free music, this is also great news for beaTunes users.

OS X 10.4.11 solves iTunes Plus-CoreAudio problems

It looks like the recent OS X 10.4.11 update solved a couple of issues with opening iTunes Plus files with CoreAudio. Previously, CoreAudio APIs were often not able to even open an iTunes Plus file even though no DRM was employed. For beaTunes users this was pretty annoying, since they had to fall back to a not as fast QuickTime implementation of the same code, that had to be manually enabled.

Apple to lower iTunes Plus prices

Ars Technica is reporting that Apple will drop the price for DRM-free music to 99c per track. Apple had introduced DRM-free tracks under the label iTunes Plus earlier this year. The price drop seems to be a reaction to the newly opened Amazon MP3 store, which sells DRM-free music at a more competitive price.

beaTunes users benefit directly from DRM-free tracks, since they allow automatic analysis of their raw audio data.

Update: Apple officially announced today that it lowers prices to 99c.

DRM-Free MP3s from Amazon

Great news for iTunes users! Today Amazon went public with a beta version of their new MP3 shop dubbed Amazon MP3. The new service has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. All files are 256kbps encoded DRM-free MP3s - which basically means they play in iTunes, on iPods, Zunes and pretty much any other player out there. According to the Amazon press release, most songs are priced between $0.89 and $0.99. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99.

For beaTunes users this means that they can now buy tracks at a decent price electronically without running into the DRM trap. This comes only a few months after Apple introduced a limited offering of DRM-free tracks to their music store for the premium price of $1.29 per track.

For both technical and legal reasons beaTunes cannot analyze the raw audio of DRM protected files.

Non-DRM songs now on iTunes

With the new iTunes 7.2 out today, Apple starts to sell non-DRM music provided by EMI. As mentioned earlier, the songs are sold for $1.29 a piece. Apple dubbed the new offering iTunes Plus.

By the way, as Erica Sadun has been quick to point out, just like the DRM-cousins, non-DRM files purchased from iTunes have the buyer's account name embedded...

In another press release Apple also announced iTunes U, offering lectures from leading US universities for free.

Apple will sell non-DRM music soon

Apple will start selling non-DRM music provided by EMI in May. That's the bottomline of a press release published yesterday by Apple Inc. The songs will be higher quality (256 kbps AAC, as opposed to 128 kbps AAC) and $0.30 more expensive.

This is great news for beaTunes users, since until now Apple's DRM system Fairplay prevented them from analyzing their own music.

Artists like The Rolling Stones, Beastie Boys, Janet Jackson, Mando Diao, etc. are all signed by EMI.