Amazon has opened their music download service for german customers. About 5 million MP3’s can be downloaded. Prices vary between 0.77€ and 0.99€. Complete albums start at 4.95€.

Amazon does not use DRM techniques. MP3’s are encoded at 256KBit/sec. By using the MP3 format these files can be played on virtually any digital portable music player.

Downloading requires Amazon’s MP3-Downloader. Amazon supports all major operating systems like Windows, MacOS X and Linux (Debian 4, Ubuntu 9, OpenSuSE 11, Fedora 9). The growing number of Linux users will most likely appreciate a way to legally buy and download music.