Amazon.com on Thursday announced a new deal with Sony BMG to sell its digital music without copy protection. Sony is the last of the major record labels to jump on the Digital Rights Management-free bandwagon.

Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 digital music store will now feature music from all four major labels — Sony, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI — as well as more than 33,000 independent labels. The MP3 songs are playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes, Zens, iPhones, RAZRs and BlackBerrys. Sony’s music will debut on Amazon.com later that month.

“We are excited to be working with Amazon as they continue to build new markets for digital music,” Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s Global Digital Business & U.S. Sales, said in a statement. “We are constantly exploring new ways of making our music available to consumers in the physical space, by the Net and through

mobile phones, and that initiative is the newest element of our ongoing campaign to bring our music to fans wherever they happen to be.”

Moving In on iTunes

Launched in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers the largest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes by 3.1 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is encoded at 256 Kbps to deliver high audio quality.

Amazon.com’s pricing scheme is slightly lower than iTunes in many cases. iTunes offers a standard 99-cent price tag on its singles. Most songs available on Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the by 3.1 million songs priced at 89 cents. Most of the top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents; most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99;…

Original post by Top Tech News