Amazon MP3 Goes Worldwide

The largest DRM-free music site on the Web will soon bring its musical offerings outside the United States for the first time.

Besides murmurs about Yahoo diving into DRM-free music and Qtrax attempting to put profit back into stolen tracks, the past few days have also brought Amazon’s announcement that it would be pushing its own DRM-free music service worldwide. Amazon announced on Sunday that Amazon MP3 would soon be springing up international sites in response to consumer demand.

“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.” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president of digital music, in a statement. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”

Amazon currently holds the title as the largest ala carte retailer of DRM-free music with 3.3 million songs and 270,000 artists. All four major record labels, including Warner, Sony, EMI and Universal, have contracts with the site.

Amazon currently has affiliate Web sites in the UK, Germany, Austria, Japan, China, France, and Canada. No specific launch dates were mentioned for the international sites.