Amazon took another step in its battle to unseat iTunes as king of the digital music world by announcing its MP3 store will be opening to the international market sometime in 2008, enabling residents from other countries outside the US to purchase music from the website.

Amazon MP3 was launched back in September in the US and currently offers over 3.3 million DRM-free songs from all four major music labels, encoded at 256 kbps and priced from 89 cents to 99 cents. There is no word yet on how international Amazon will go with the Amazon MP3 music service as the company did not specify whether the service would be available in all countries where Amazon operates, or even better, worldwide – though given the stringent country-specific copyright restrictions set up by record labels, I doubt this will be the case.