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These seems to be great news for the music distrubution market:
“Amazon mp3 BETA - Play Anywhere, DRM-Free Downloads”

(via All Things Distributed: Amazon MP3 by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels)

The store is well integrated in the Amazon look and feel and very easy to use, search, get recommandations, pre-listen(, buy, and download). As icing on the cake, album purchases are “really” album purchases and you get a substantial discount by buying the album as a whole; for example you spend 9.49 $ and save 13.28 $ on the purchase of Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years.
Sound quality is good (256 Kbps avarage bitrate) and no DRM make it a really appealing service.

The (not so) bad news are: the album purchase requires the installation of the “Amazon MP3 Downloader” only available on Windows and Mac, not that bad because a Linux client is in development.

The REALLY bad news are: I wasn’t able to fulfill my purchase because Territorial Restrictions make the purchase available available only customers located in the United States (DOH! - no forseeable bug fixes).

5. Territorial Restrictions

As required by our Digital Content providers, Digital Content will, unless otherwise designated, be available only to customers located in the United States.

Bottom line: I can buy a physical book and have it delivered across the ocean, but I am not able to have digital content delivered through the Internet. Really Really Disappointed.