Here comes potential iTunes killer- Napster's "DRM-Free MP3 Store"

Online music provider Napster Inc. on Tuesday launched an MP3 store that the company boasts will offer more than 6 million songs to download, apparently posing a direct challenge to Apple Inc's iTunes, the most popular music and video service on the Web that enables users to buy and download television shows and movies.

The digital music service Napster hopes its new Web-based music store that offers 6 million-songs from all major music labels as well as thousands of independent labels will help it lift company’s sliding fortunes.

With the launch of its own digital music download store, the Los Angeles-based Napster, the pioneer of digital music, has become the latest to make the shift to the unrestricted file format.

"It's great that we have finally gotten here," Napster's chairman and chief executive Chris Gorog said. "It is really the beginning of a level playing field, which I think is essential for Napster, but also for the health of the digital music business in general."

This also makes Napster the latest name to join the list of companies that have been making immense efforts to take down Apple’s wildly popular online music store, iTunes. In a bid to challenge Apple’s dominant position in the music industry, MySpace, the most popular social networking site last month unveiled a music service, MySpace Music.

Likewise, online heavyweight Amazon.com, last year in September, launched an online music store, "Amazon MP3," which provides DRM-free downloads of over 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels. In October, 2007, Flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. launched an online video service Fanfare that offers TV shows for download, just like Apple Inc.’s iTunes.

The new Napster music store will sell all DRM (digital rights management)-free tracks, meaning they will be compatible with the vast majority of digital media players and mobile phones, including Apple's widely popular iPod as well as it revolutionary iPhone, an all-in-one cell phone/iPod/pocket computer and Microsoft Zune. They also can be burnt on CDs and transferred to other portable devices.

"Napster now offers a truly complete and synergistic digital music destination, where music lovers can not only discover and listen to music, but also buy and own everything they want in MP3 format, which works on any music player. The combination offers consumers the best of both worlds," Napster Chief Operating Officer Christopher Allen said in a statement.

According to the company, Napster MP3- format songs will be priced at 99 cents each, while a full DRM-free album downloads will start at $9.95.

Napster that recently announced 760,000 subscribers (as of March 31) on its account said it will continue to offer the ‘all you can eat’ music subscription service.