Apple Computer today launched a brand new online music service called the iTunes Music Store allowing users to browse through a catalog containing 30-second samples of over 200,000 song titles from all 5 major music labels. Anyone with a Mac and Apple's iTunes 4 can visit the store and download any available song they wish for only 99 cents apiece, without need for a subscription or membership fee. The song files are 128 kbps in a new file format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) which is supposed to sound better than MP3 files at the same sampling rate and even compress to a smaller size.

Leave it to Apple to package hot-topic technology in a very cool and very smart way.