Amazon’s MP3 Store To Go Global

It was only last week when we bought a copy of M.I.A.s Paper Planes from Amazon for 89c so that we could play it n the office speakers. Just after we did it, of course, young Jeff pipes up that if you Google ‘MIA Paper Planes MP3′ you can find it for free. Oh well, we hope the young Mia enjoys her 0.2c from the sale or whatever her record contract affords her.

Of course, there’s always the shared servers and the P2P sites to find this music, but sometimes you just want a single track fast - and DRM free - so you can play a tune out loud at a sudden urge on a Friday afternoon. And Amazon MP3 is a good place to do this (for some of us anyway). It’s also got a crafty download device to stick all the tracks in your iTunes.

Thank goodness, it’s available to the rest of you: Amazon MP3 site is to roll out its store to the rest of the globe. The press release says:

“We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”

Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes 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(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.

Amazon.com–News Release