Today, Amazon.com launched their ‘important for the industry’ Amazon MP3 download service. This is a big deal…

Why? Amazon is offering 2 million songs for download (Apple offers 6 million through their iTunes Store) that are completely DRM-free. Yes, there is no protection of any kind built into these songs.. so this means you can play the songs on your ‘Plays For Sure’ mp3 player or your iPod or anything else that can play mp3s. In addition, the songs are encoded at a very high quality of 256kbps… Apple encodes their songs in 128 kbps AAC, which is supposed to be equivalent to 192 kbps MP3.

If DRM-free isn’t a big enough selling point for you, then how about this? Amazon guarantees that their top 100 songs will be $0.89 each, and the other songs are in the $0.89 to $0.99 cent range. In addition, full albums are $8.99 or less. A great deal!

When you click “Buy Now” on a song in Amazon, a small program will launch on your computer that will download the song and automatically import the song into iTunes. The process is seamless, although it still doesn’t compare to the absolute ease of use you get out of the iTunes Store.

For a few weeks, I’m going to try to make AmazonMP3 my goto site for music. Let’s see how it goes. For now, I’m jamming away to my new Apples in Stereo album.

Apple released a set of “iTunes Widgets“, which allows you to put your iTunes purchases, favorite artists, and reviews on your website. No AJAX love… they are built using Flash, yet they are simple and nice.

For you WordPress users out there, I have created a widget that allows you to integrate the My iTunes page to your sidebar (see the iTunes widget in action on the right). Note that I haven’t tested this code on any other WordPress installations, so your mileage may vary. Please comment if you do end up using the widget on your site.

[ Download "My iTunes" Widget for WordPress ]