Amazon MP3 launched today, offering over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists and over 20,000 labels.

Songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, and albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. Most of the top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, and the top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less. (I always love when stores sell the good stuff for cheap, hoping that customers will stay and buy some more expensive items as well.)

Amazon MP3 opens as direct competition to the iTunes Music Store. Both offer DRM-free music (Amazon: mp3, iTunes Music Store: m4a) at 256-kbps, and have the support of major labels. Currently, Amazon MP3 offers less than half of the music selection as the iTunes Music Store (2 million songs compared to 5 million), but from looking at the Top 100 page, they have all the big names covered. Furthermore, you don’t need anything except a web browser to purchase from Amazon MP3 (a small application is needed to download whole albums, but not individual songs). The iTunes Music Store has always bugged me since it is unreachable except through iTunes.

At this rate, I am interested in seeing who takes over the internet first: Google or Amazon. I can see Amazon acquiring eBay and PayPal, and becoming the eCommerce warlord of the internet. From there, Amazon would simply need to leverage its myriad Web Services (S3, Mechanical Turk, etc.) and purchase and integrate Microsoft’s Live Search. Of course, by that time Google may have eaten the media and the internet may have been transformed into GoogleNet.

Then again, maybe our future is Googlezon.

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