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The record company joins Universal Music and EMI on the Amazon store, leaving just Sony BMG as the one major label that maintains a strict DRM-only policy. But while EMI tracks are available without usage restrictions on Apple's dominant iTunes Store and elsewhere, both Warner and Universal have declined to license DRM-free downloading outside Amazon.

Amazon MP3 launched in September and has an estimated 3% of the US music downloads market; Apple has in excess of 70%.

"We're very pleased with where we are," Pete Baltaxe, Amazon's director of digital music said, though he would not provide

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data on the number of downloads sold to date.

It has priced about one-third of its nearly three million songs at 89 cents each, below the standard iTunes price of 99 cents, though it charges markedly higher prices for some albums and tracks.

Michael Nash, Warner's senior vice president, Digital Strategy and Business Development, said that the decision to join Amazon provides consumers with the flexibility they want

"We believe that giving consumers the assurance that the music they purchase can be played on any device they own will only encourage more sales of music," he said.

That is a remarkable turnaround for a company whose chief executive, Edgar Bronfman, has been one of the staunchest advocates of DRM. Bronfman once said that arguments for dropping DRM were "without logic and merit", but recently softened his tone, suggesting that record companies only had themselves to blame for their failure to meet the challenge of digital music.