Amazon has launched a public beta of its new DRM-Free MP3 Music store. The store contains over 2,000,000 tracks from EMI and Universal as well as over 20,000 independent music labels. This announcement strikes a major blow in the struggle to get DRM free music for a reasonable price.

Tracks are .89 or .99 cents depending on their popularity, more popular = less expensive, and the tracks are all encoded at 256kbps, not the 320 that a lot of people had been hoping for, but much better than the alternative 192 from the iTunes Music Store. More importantly, the tracks are not subject to sales tax, at least for me in Texas, as the iTunes Music Store offerings are.

In my opinion the price is still a little high and the bit-rate is still a little low, and I’ll explain why I think so in a future article, but until then here’s a breakdown of the Amazon MP3 purchasing experience.

The first thing you’ll notice about Amazon MP3 is that it’s not iTunes, nor is it a software application that normal DRM laden music purchasers are accustomed to. It’s just a website with all the charm of a normal Amazon.com webpage, everything is easy enough to find and the selection is satisfactory, although I hope that more major labels sign-on to this program in the future.

Amazon MP3 provides the standard 30 second preview when purchasing tracks and provides both an individual track as well as entire album buy buttons.

Amazon MP3 offers 2 ways of downloading your tracks, the first being their custom downloading software, the other being directly from the website, I opted for the direct download by clicking “Skip Installation” located under the big Download Now button.

Confirm your purchase and you’re on your way to DRM-Free bliss.

The moment of truth and uncertainty, the loading screen in which a single failure, a single bug could bring your music buying experience to a complete and complete and abrupt halt…

But no! Success! A flawless download with all the trimmings including album art and a full set of ID3 tags.

And finally we have my liberated, legal, DRM-Free MP3 happily residing in my iTunes.

A- service from Amazon, just knock the price down, up the bit-rate and add some more major labels and we have the future of music downloads.