About half a year after announcing plans to open an online music store, LimeWire has followed through on its threat promise to go at least partially legit. The LimeWire store features about half a million tracks from a diverse set of mostly independent or minor label artists that you may or may not have heard of. There are a few big names featured on the front page, like Dolly Parton, Josh Rouse, Bell X1, and Gloria Gaynor. We really never thought we'd be writing a sentence with all four of those artists in it, but there you go. The site is currently in beta and the LimeWire team says it has plans to add "thousands of tracks daily."

All tracks are available as 256kbps MP3 files. Pricing is $.99 for a single track. Or you can get 25 downloads per month for $9.99, 50 for $14.99 or 75 for $19.99. At that last price, you essentially get 75 songs for $.27 each, assuming you actually download 75 tracks each month.

Currently the LimeWire store is completely separate from the LimeWire peer to peer file sharing application. There's no way to use the LimeWire client to speed up downloads, but the company does plan to offer some sort of integration in the future. How they plan to prevent users from buying songs and then sharing them with the world for free remains to be seen.

[via P2P Blog]