Amazon.com announced it will open a digital music store later this year with millions of songs available free of copy protection technology. The internet retailer has reached an agreement with EMI, home to artists including Coldplay, Norah Jones, Joss Stone and Pink Floyd.

Under the terms of agreement Amazon.com will offer EMI's entire digital catalogue, which is available in a higher quality, DRM-free premium download format, for sale in its new digital music store. The Amazon.com digital music store will exclusively offer tracks and albums as MP3s free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

Last month, EMI announced it would become the first major music group to make its music available online without Digital Rights Management (DRM), a key anti-piracy measure that limits what users can do with purchased songs.

Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said, "Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device. 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." Amazon's stores will allow customers to play their music on virtually any personal device, including personal computers, Apple's Macintosh computers, Apple's iPod music players and Microsoft Corp's Zune music players. Users will also be able to burn songs to compact discs.

EMI announced its first deal with the iTunes online music store in April. iTunes sells individual EMI tracks, with their DRM removed, at twice the sound quality of existing downloads for $1.29.

In February in an open letter entitled suggestively "Thoughts on Music". Apple’s boss Steve Jobs urges the music industry to drop DRM. Jobs confessed the fact that the DRM imposed to customers on iTunes was a consequence of tough negotiations with the world’s four largest record companies, which he wanted to bring on iTunes.

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats," Jobs wrote. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

After EMI and Apple announced the introduction of DRM free songs on iTunes store, Jason Reindorp, head of marketing for Zune, hinted that Microsoft will sell DRM free songs via its Zune platform. “We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content.”, Reindrop said.