Amazon has finally made it’s music download store open to the public: MP3 Beta.

I am excited to see some healthy competition to iTunes. For one thing, the music is all MP3 and DRM free! And for another, they are experimenting with variable pricing, basically dropping the price on more popular songs. Both are great steps in the right direction and I look forward to using the service.

Actually, I’ve already bought and downloaded some stuff and it worked great. The install worked perfectly on my Mac, an album download worked fine, music got dropped in a reasonable place, etc. I use emusic a lot and it’s equivalent in ease of use, except maybe in selecting payment which is slightly more complicated as I needed to select a payment form (emusic is subscription-based). Songs seem to be encoded at 256kbps.

Here’s hoping this creates some competition and downward price pressure. Come’on guys, let’s head towards $0.25/song!