And the people of the Internet rejoiced. Dealing yet another crushing blow to Draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) [1], Amazon.com has announced that its long-rumored DRM-free music store [2] will go live later this summer. The as-yet unnamed store will allegedly offer "millions" of songs from 12,000 different labels, which it will sell as unprotected MP3 files. Thus far, the only label that has been revealed as participating is EMI (no big surprise there). "Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement. "We're excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone." It looks like Amazon is going to beat Apple in achieving the dream of a DRM-free music store [3], though it remains to be seen exactly which labels will be offering content and at what price. Regardless, this is a major victory for consumers and hopefully heralds the coming of a DRM-free world.

For more on the music store:
- see this Ars Technica article [4]