Amazon.com today confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in digital music, saying it plans to launch a digital rights management (DRM)-free digital store later this year.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

The online retailing giant said it will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs and has inked a deal with EMI, one of the four major labels, to license its catalog, including tracks from the likes of Norah Jones, Coldplay, and Joss Stone.

The key component of Amazon's store, and what is widely believed to be the cause of the delay in launching it, is the company's decision to avoid the use of any DRM technology, which restricts what a user can do with purchased music. With DRM, music downloaded on iTunes, for instance, will only play on an iPod.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

The major record labels have insisted on the use of DRM to combat piracy, but support for DRM has begun to crack in recent months. First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an online manifesto that questioned the use of DRM and pledged to remove it if allowed to do so by the labels.

Last month, EMI became the first major label to allow the sale of its music without DRM, inking a deal with Apple's iTunes to sell DRM-free, higher-fidelity versions of its songs for 30 cents more than the iTunes standard of 99 cents a song.

Whether Amazon is able to convince the other major labels to eschew DRM is the big question. Warner Music has pledged its allegiance to DRM, with CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. calling Jobs' manifesto "completely without logic or merit."

Amazon did not say how much it would charge for the songs. In addition to EMI, Amazon said its store would include music from about 12,000 other music labels.