Sony BMG signs onto Amazon's DRM-free music store
It's a full hand of cards for Amazon: the Web's mega-retailer announced Thursday that it will be selling music from Sony BMG Music Entertainment in its Amazon MP3 store. This means that Amazon MP3, which only sells "naked" tracks without any digital rights management (DRM) protection, now has deals with all four major music labels. Because of the lack of copy protection, any song from Amazon MP3 can play on virtually any media-playing device, from PCs to music players to cell phones and PDAs.
The DRM-free songs from Sony BMG will be available for purchase on Amazon MP3 later this month.
Sony BMG announced earlier this week its intent to drop DRM from its music, making it the last major label to do so. Amazon MP3, which launched in September, already sells music from the other three major labels--EMI, the Vivendi-owned Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group--as well as over 33,000 independent labels. Currently, there are 3.1 million songs for purchase.
A full catalog of DRM-free music files means that Amazon is legitimately poised to take on Apple's iTunes Store, the industry leader by far in digital music sales. Most of Amazon's songs, which range largely from 89 to 99 cents, outprice Apple's 99-cent standard. And as the result of disagreements with Apple, Universal Music Group has not licensed its DRM-free catalog to the iTunes Store.
In the meantime, Apple dropped the prices of its DRM-free songs from a premium $1.29 to the regular 99 cents, a sign that it was starting to feel the pressure from Amazon.
Amazon doesn't yet have the market share to start boasting, but it finally has the upper hand in a culture that has increasingly turned against digital rights management. User experience reviews of Amazon MP3 have been mixed, but there's little doubt that this poses the most formidable threat to the iTunes monopoly yet.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline.
DRM-free. They don't want to because Apple won't negotiate with
them on price.
After they think they've got enough traction with Amazon sales,
they'll start upping the price on the DRM-free music. It's a ploy to
force Apple to let them raise prices at the iTunes Music Store.
Yes I know not everything is available but there's enough I can do without those songs that the artists or music conglomerates don't want to make available.
Maybe its Apple and Jobs that are demanding certain terms they dont want to give into?
Its simple IMHO. All music should be DRM free. The music companies should get together and set a price across the board for everyone. The the USER chooses whom to buy it from.
I have no problem buying music from Amazon and then using iTunes and my iPod to listen to it.
Your purchase that you "lent" to a friend ends up on Limewire? Welcome to lawsuitville!
one who instituted DRM when Steve Jobs has been fighting for
DRM-free music for quite some time. This article makes it
sound like DRM-free music is an invention of Amazon.com. This
whole thing is just a ploy by the record labels to weaken the
iTunes Music Store.
I can't imagine that Amazon is making much of anything on
$0.89 a song music downloads unless they have gotten some
pricing breaks from the various music labels. That, in itself,
would only make sense in light of the music labels yanking
Apple's chain. Why else would they lower prices for Amazon
when their main beef with Apple was that they should be
allowed MORE for some songs.
So what we have is the music labels foregoing revenue, just to
prove a point with Apple. Look out, if this strategy succeeds,
you can look forward to paying a lot more for your music down
the road. Jobs understands the consumer pricing model a lot
better than the record labels do, it appears. But then, greed is a
powerful motivating force for the record labels, that's for sure.