Will Restriction-Free Songs Sell? Watch Amazon
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The online retail giant finally launches song downloads, injecting a dose of competition into the digital music market.
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The latest version of Hymn can already remove DRM protection from songs purchased from the iTunes 7 store to enable playback on non-iPod players.  In Listening Post.
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with more than 2 million songs, all without copy-protection technology.
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Warner Music agrees to sell its music for download on Amazon in MP3 format without copy protection.
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Come Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon.com will get a leg up in the digital music race it's running against Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. And not just any leg: Justin Timberlake's leg.
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying.
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment will crack open the door to its music vaults on Jan. 15, taking the DRM copy-prevention wrapper off a limited selection of downloadable tracks.The tracks will be offered in MP3 format, without DRM (digital rights management), from Jan. 15 in the U.S. and from late January in Canada.The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card&#39;s covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears&#39; &quot;Blackout&quot; and Barry Manilow&#39;s &quot;The Greatest Songs of the Seventies.&quot;In contrast, online retailer&#160;Amazon.com offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in MP3 format from the catalogs of EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and a host of independent record labels. Apple&#39;s&#160;iTunes Store has around 2 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in the AAC format supported by its iPod and many mobile phones. No store visit is necessary to download those tracks, and an album typically sells for $9.99 or less.About 4,500 retail outlets in the U.S. will sell the Platinum MusicPass cards by the end of the month, including Best Buy, Target, Trans World, Fred&#39;s, and Winn-Dixie, according to Sony-BMG. In Canada, the cards will sell through Best Buy, CD Plus, and Wal-Mart, and later through record store HMV.Online sales will &quot;ultimately be part of the game plan&quot; for at least one of those retail outlets, said a source familiar with the offering.With Valentine&#39;s Day approaching, Sony-BMG is counting on demand for gift cards to boost sales of the downloads, as well as the collectible nature of the cards themselves, which feature images of the artists and information about the albums.Sony-BMG will offer &quot;expanded&quot; versions of two of the initial offerings -- Celine Dion&#39;s &quot;Taking Chances&quot; and Kenny Chesney&#39;s &quot;Just Who I Am: Poets &amp; Pirates.&quot; These will retail for around $19.99 and in addition to the Platinum version will also include an additional album from the artist&#39;s back catalog.When they first considered online music sales, major record labels initially insisted that download services such as Apple&#39;s iTunes Store encrypt their tracks with DRM technology to prevent copying.Smaller labels sold unprotected MP3 files through sites like eMusic.com, gambling that the increased sales and notoriety that would come with easier access to their music would outweigh sales lost through unauthorized copying.That argument eventually won favor with Apple, which last May began offering tracks from EMI without DRM for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.Amazon followed suit in September, selling unprotected MP3 files from EMI and Universal. Warner joined them on Dec. 28.The record companies all say they hope the move will lead to greater online music sales.Sony-BMG said it hopes its combined model, selling a download pass through a physical store, will lead to greater sales of physical and digital music.Albums need a boost, as the number sold in the U.S. dropped again last year, even as the number of music purchases rose, market watcher Nielsen SoundScan reported last week.U.S. music buyers made 1.4 billion music purchases in 2007, up from 1.2 billion a year earlier, Nielsen said.Nielsen counts a purchase as an album, single, CD or online download. Within that figure, digital track sales rose from 582 million to 844 million as buyers cherry-picked the tracks they liked from albums available online, while physical album sales (whether sold in-store or over the Internet, but excluding downloads) fell to 451 million in 2007, from 556 million in 2006, it said.But if U.S. consumers are making more music purchases, they may be spending less: Nielsen also counts something it calls track-equivalent album sales, in which it counts 10 track downloads as the equivalent of an album. By that measure, track-equivalent album sales fell 9.5 percent to 585 million in 2007, from 646 million in 2007.&#160;
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After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format.
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Warner Music Group becomes the latest big studio to sell DRM-free tunes through Amazon.com.
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London will be equipped with vending machines that sell individual songs.    Also: Adobe Reader 7.0 lets viewers edit text on Acrobat & hellip;.  Yahoo competes with rivals by expanding its free e-mail storage space  & hellip;. and more.
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Along with its library of 2 million songs, Amazon.com is bringing something else to the online music marketplace: competition. When it opened Sept. 25, Amazon's MP3 digital download store undercut iTunes' prices on many albums. Its tracks, most of which sell for 89 to 99 cents, have higher sound quality than standard iTunes tracks and come without copy restrictions - known as digital rights management - that make it difficult to move tracks to a variety of portable devices, including iPods and Windows Media players.
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Amazon MP3 is a digital music store in public beta that offers DRM-free music downloads, allowing users to download the music to their audio player of choice or burn songs onto CDs.
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Come Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon.com will get a leg up in the digital music race it's running against Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store.
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Amazon.com has begun a new chapter in its battle for customers&#39; ears: it has agreed to pay $300 million for Audible, a seller of audio books that has a close relationship with Apple.Ten-year-old Audible sells spoken-word content such as audio books, magazines, and radio programs through a number of channels, including its Web sites in the U.S. and U.K. It has 80,000 titles in its catalog, and a further 20,000 through partner sites in France and Germany.Amazon began reselling Audible&#39;s content in 2000, and since 2002, Audible has also distributed audio books through Apple&#39;s iTunes Store, when it became Apple&#39;s exclusive supplier of spoken-word content. Apple modified the software in its iPods to allow &quot;bookmarking&quot; of Audible audio files.This chapter in the battle for listeners may yet have a happy ending for Apple, as the Audible team plans to continue and grow its relationship with the iTunes Store, according to Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener. But that goes for Audible&#39;s many other channel partnerships too: &quot;We plan to continue and grow all these relationships,&quot; Herdener said.Apple declined to comment on the deal.The main battle front between Apple and Amazon remains the sale of digital music free of the restrictions imposed by DRM (digital rights management) systems, where Amazon has been competing with Apple in the U.S. since September.When Apple opened its iTunes Store, the music it sold was wrapped in a layer of DRM to prevent copying, which incidentally tied the music to Apple&#39;s iPod players and iTunes software.Some record companies were unhappy that Apple limited the sales to its players in this way, and last May&#160;Apple began offering tracks from EMI without DRM&#160;for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.&#160;Amazon joined the fray&#160;in September, selling music from EMI and Universal in MP3 format, without DRM,&#160;adding tracks from Warner to its catalog&#160;in December. It now offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks, compared to 2 million DRM-free tracks in Apple&#39;s iTunes Store. Apple offers millions more tracks with DRM.Audible&#39;s audio books are wrapped in a layer of DRM, which Amazon does not plan to remove unless customers start to complain, Herdener said.&quot;Each media marketplace has its own business dynamics,&quot; he said.Amazon recently moved into the electronic book market with the launch of its Kindle e-reader, a device for downloading and displaying electronic books. Kindle also plays audio files, including those sold by Audible, making it a (much bulkier) competitor to the iPod.The $300 million price tag for Audible includes the assumption of outstanding stock option obligations. The companies expect to close the deal by April.
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Amazon.com will start selling MP3 music files through its international Web sites this year, the company said Sunday. But details of the company&#39;s plans to expand its&#160;digital music service&#160;remain scarce.
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Amazon MP3 joins the lineup of digital music stores, selling tunes unencumbered by copy protection technology. Of course, that means some artists are simply unavailable.