As reported before, Apple has launched its iTunes Music Store (iTMS) in Japan on 4th Aug 2005! At the press conference at Tokyo, Steve Jobs announced that iTMS is live with million songs in AAC format.

These songs are from 15 record companies, where 90% of them are sold for 150Yen (approx US$1.35) each and the less are 200Yen (approx US$1.80) each.

iTMS Japan also provides download of whole albums with an attractive pricing! For example, albums of B’z with 340 titles of songs can be purchased for just 18800Yen (US$169). Wow, not even 50 cents per song!

Beside credit card payment, Apple also introduce its iTunes Music Card with three values of 2,500Yen, 5,000Yen and 10,000Yen. It allows the consumer to purchase the music in prepaid mode.

At the same time, Apple also announced that iTMS will provide download for the songs of Abkco Records‘ artists such as Sam Cooke, The Animals and Rolling Stones. With this partnership, iTunes becomes the one and only one company that has complete list of Rolling Stones’ albums to be downloaded. For those pre-purchase Rolling Stones’ latest album, “A Bigger Bang”, you can get an additional music video of it!

{ via iMP3.net }