Amazon DRM-Free Music Store Goes Beta

[helena nilo]

Amazon MP3 Open for Public Beta
3:04 AM PDT, September 25, 2007
We're extremely happy to announce we've launched a public beta of Amazon MP3, our new digital music service. You're officially welcome to shop Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 digital music downloads.

To put it plainly, we're music nerds who love bargains and want to be able to transfer our digital music between our computers, portable players and CD-Rs with no strings attached, so we worked to build a place where we would want to shop. We hope you're as excited about this as we are.

We've got over 2 million songs by more than 180,000 artists from over 20,000 major and independent labels, so there's plenty of great music to discover. Since our top 100 albums are priced at $8.99 and our top 100 songs are priced at 89 cents (unless marked otherwise, like, say, it's a double album or something like that), you can score high-quality mp3s from artists like Kanye West, KT Tunstall and Spoon at low prices.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1GR94T4PJ38D6

"Amazon this morning moved their DRM-free music store into open beta. According to the release, 'Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(tm), iPods(tm), Zunes(tm), Zens(tm), iPhones(tm), RAZRs(tm), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(tm) and Windows Media Player(tm), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free.' Not to mention Linux." Of course, without DRM few of the major labels play with them.

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/09/25/1951219.shtml

discussion:
EldavoJohn I agree with your comment regarding the fact that un-signed musicians are now able to advertise their content via Amazon.Com's Online Store however there are also many other vectors which are able to be used to promote un-signed artists, of which include Jamendo.Com; although the file format used is primarily an OGG file format, a format which multiple multimedia applications, of which include Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 and Apple iTunes are unable to process without the installation of an additional codec. Amazon.Com has become a serious consideration however it's a pity that that Online Store is only available to residents of the United States Of America, and, being a resident of the United Kingdom, I'm unable to use it. Until the Online Store is available in the United Kingdom, I will continue to perouse Jamendo.Com. http://www.jamendo.com/ [jamendo.com] - Jamendo.Com - Open Your Ears

...

There's already been DRM free music [emusic.com] for quite a while. People like to complain that the music isn't available online without DRM, but aren't willing to vote with their wallet, and stop buying music from bands and labels that require DRM to download songs. Currently I get all my music from eMusic. It doesn't have everything I want, but it does have a lot of good music. I'd rather have music for about $3-$5 an album, than have to put up with DRM'd files, or paying $15 for a single album on CD.

[helena nilo]

Not Too Shabby -- Amazon MP3 is the first online music store that hasn't left me cold. Its advantages are very real:

* No DRM. No consumer likes DRM, and although Apple hasn't yet released any statistics on how the DRM-free tracks from EMI have sold in comparison with the DRM-encumbered versions of the same tracks, Amazon has done the right thing by eliminating it across the board. Hopefully Amazon's move will give Apple some leverage with the music labels to make more DRM-free tracks available.
* iPod compatibility. Thanks to the lack of DRM, and in particular, Windows-specific DRM, songs purchased from Amazon MP3 will play on an iPod, something that has never been true for a mainstream online music retailer (other than Apple) before.
* Low prices. I don't have a sense for how price-conscious the online music market really is, but with many tracks priced below even the cost of Apple's DRM-encumbered tracks, and albums priced even lower, I could see budget-driven consumers or those who buy a lot of music preferring to purchase from Amazon MP3 over the iTunes Store.
* 1-Click shopping. People do not like creating new accounts for shopping, but there's no question that some people shop from Amazon over other venues purely because it's such a known quantity after years of easy ordering. Ordering via Amazon MP3 isn't as easy as from the iTunes Store, but it's not far off.

I don't think Amazon MP3 will be putting the iTunes Store out of business by any stretch of the imagination. It's competitive, thanks to the lack of DRM, low prices, and ease of shopping, but it's clumsier than using iTunes, and everyone who has an iPod will be using iTunes anyway to sync music, so it's not as though Amazon can ever get as close to the iPod as Apple can. The good news is that by releasing an online music store that doesn't suck, Amazon has given Apple some real competition, and where there's competition, there's innovation.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9203
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/09/30/0148246.shtml