News 

According to reports in the Telegraph, Amazon executives have been in the UK over the last week in order to thrash out details of the new shop with British music labels.

The shop, which will offer DRM free music, will reportedly be open before the final quarter of the year, spearheading an international rollout of the service.

The online music shop was launched in the US last year, and claims to offer around five million MP3 music tracks from the four major music labels Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner.

Amazon sees this as a significant advantage over Apple's rival service, iTunes, which currently only offers DRM-free tracks from EMI.