Exciting stuff. Amazon today pulled the curtains of their new music store (in beta of course) and at first glance it seems to be the first real competition to iTunes - not an easy task! Just today Virgin announced it's shutting down its crappy store, and just last month Sony announced plans to disconnect Connect.

Amazon's selling high-quality DRM-free mp3s for 89 or 99 cents, and most full albums are 8.99. I would have preferred AAC to MP3 but it's still not a bad deal. They certainly don't have the catalog iTunes does, but they quite possibly have more DRM-free music than iTunes Plus.

Tracks are downloaded directly from the website, but full album downloads are done via an Amazon Downloader, and yes there's a Mac version. John Gruber has an overview of the process, and it seems like it's pretty straight forward and simple.