Amazon.com, the internet retailer, wants to launch an online music store next month to challenge Apple and is working on plans to sell music with reduced protection against copyright infringement.

The internet giant has approached all the music majors in the past fortnight and said that it wanted to sell unprotected MP3 songs in May as it tries to follow Apple in shaking up the music industry.

However, it remains unclear if Amazon will meet its deadline. The internet retailer has been trying, unsuccessfully, over 18 months to break into the market dominated by Apple iTunes, which has a share of about 80 per cent.

Selling music without copy protection is controversial, because it makes digitally downloaded songs easier to copy. At the beginning of the month EMI broke ranks and signed an agreement with Apple to provide unprotected songs for a higher price.

If Amazon’s MP3 service does launch as planned, music is most likely to come from EMI and independent labels. Speculation that Vivendi’s Universal Music was already signed up to test classical MP3 downloads is understood to be wide of the mark.

Amazon’s efforts have been held back by various problems. It originally wanted to launch its own music player to rival the iPod in tandem with the store and held discussions with manufacturers, but these failed to develop successfully.

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