Looks like we have another battle on the horizon. The battle between Amazon and iTunes that is. The Amazon MP3 service was announced today that they will be going global, though a launch date has not yet been set. To be honest, it’s about time someone has stepped up to the plate to compete against iTunes, it was only a matter of time.

Amazon MP3 catalogue is the only digital music catalogue that offers DRM-free tracks from all 4 major labels, which are significantly cheaper than iTunes. Amazons MP3 catalogue offers roughly around 3.3 million tracks, which obviously is a heavy competitor to iTunes.

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Amazon.com as annouced that they have convinced Sony to not take the DRM route.

This news means Sony’s digital music will be free of copy protection which is great for those who want to share what they have. Amazon is expected to have Sony’s music on their website later this month to sell.

–Take that Apple iTunes–

I’ve just received an email from Amazon about a new service they’ll be rolling out soon. Amazon SimpleDB, which will compliment their growing range of web services, will work with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide the ability to store, process and query datasets in the cloud.

This is something that many developers will find attractive. I know we use Amazon web services for some of our larger web properties, for a range of things from backups to image hosting, and this new addition could be useful for several uses.

Amazon Says “Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.”

This will be appealing to startups, as setting up complex database solutions can be costly. Existing companies can also reap benefits, but being web-based, if speed is of importance you’d be better off maintaining your own database infrastructure.

The private BETA will be available in a few weeks - I can’t wait to try it out. Drop a comment if you’re interested to hear about our experiences with it.