Amazon MP3 Music Store Opens Today
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Amazon.com launched the public beta of its digital music store today with over 2 million DRM-free tracks available, though many artists are missing from the store's catalog.
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Online retailer Amazon.com Inc has signed on Warner Music Group Corp to its music download service, the latest major record label to join the competitor to Apple Inc's industry-leading iTunes store.
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Online retailer Amazon.com Inc has signed on Warner Music Group to its music download service, which aims to compete with Apple Inc's industry-dominating iTunes online store.
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Almost music-free, too Amazon.com has opened its DRM-free music store for business. Songs are available for $0.89 per song, or $6 to $10 for an album.â¦
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Virgin is the first major music retailer to enter the download market in introducing a music store to sell music as streams of bits to be downloaded from the Internet.
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Amazon.com Inc  on Tuesday  launched an early version of its highly anticipated digital  music download store, which is seen as a potential rival to  Apple Inc's  dominant iTunes service.
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A company that many expected never to make it to launch has opened up offering 770,000 songs
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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.&quot;We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S.,&quot; Bill Carr, Amazon&#39;s vice president of digital music, in a statement.Amazon began selling&#160;MP3 files without digital rights management technology&#160;on its U.S. Web site in September 2007, at prices ranging from $0.89 to $0.99 per song, and $5.99 to $9.99 per album. The company&#39;s catalog includes 3.3 million songs from 270,000 artists, it said.Details of Amazon&#39;s plans to expand sales of MP3 into markets outside the U.S. remain unclear. The company did not say when this year it would start selling MP3 music files outside of the U.S., and did not specify whether the service would be available in all countries where Amazon operates.Besides the U.S., Amazon has online stores in the U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Canada, and China.
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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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The latest version of Apple&#39;s iconic MP3 player will allow photo viewing and be released in 30 to 60 days with a price tag of $499.
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It's the end of an era Amazon.com has now secured the right to sell DRM-free music from all four major labels, snagging Sony BMG.â¦
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Amazon.com has added songs from Warner Music Group to the range it sells as MP3 files without DRM (digital rights management), the companies said Friday.The online retailer&#160;launched its music download service&#160;in September and now offers 2.9 million songs without copy prevention technology, including tracks from Warner, EMI, Universal, and 33,000 independent record labels -- although it has still not won over Sony BMG, the only one of the music majors still insisting on the use of DRM.Warner said it also planned to offer album bundles including exclusive tracks through the Amazon service.The move is a blow to Apple&#39;s iTunes Store, which has only persuaded EMI and a handful of independent labels to let it offer their tracks in the&#160;DRM-free iTunes Plus format it launched in May. The rest of the songs available through iTunes come with digital limitations on where they can be played, or how many times they can be burned to a CD.Three formats dominate the market for online music sales: MP3 and AAC, which are both open formats, and WMA, a proprietary format owned by Microsoft.MP3 files do not include provision for DRM: music recorded in that format will play on most digital music players, many mobile phones, and in software readily available for all the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, opening up a huge potential market to Amazon and to other online music stores such as eMusic dealing in unprotected MP3 files.AAC is the format Apple chose for its iTunes Store. Most of the 6 million tracks in its catalog come wrapped in a proprietary DRM layer called FairPlay, although EMI and independents such as Sub Pop, Nettwerk, IODA and The Orchard also allow it to offer higher quality AAC recordings without DRM. The DRM-encumbered tracks will play on authorized iPods, iPhones, PCs, and Macs -- but won&#39;t play on digital music players from other vendors. Unprotected AAC files will also play on many mobile phones, PCs running Linux with the appropriate software, and even Microsoft&#39;s Zune digital music player.WMA files without DRM will play on PC or Macs using Windows Media Player, and some phones and digital music players -- although typically not on the same ones that play AAC files. Microsoft has also introduced a range of DRM systems enabling online stores to sell locked WMA files -- and later abandoned some of them, leaving a certain amount of confusion and doubt about whether devices and songs branded &quot;PlaysForSure&quot; really will play for sure.Industry executives expect initiatives such as iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3, which remove the DRM locks placed on music downloads by an earlier generation of music services, will encourage consumers to buy more music.Warner believes that giving consumers the assurance that the music they purchase can be played on any device they own will only encourage more sales of music, it said Friday.It may also persuade music-buyers to look at other brands of digital music player such as the Zune range from Microsoft, ending Apple&#39;s dominance of that market segment.With the locks off the music, Apple also faces the prospect of a price war with Amazon, which offers 1 million of its MP3 tracks for just $0.89, compared to the $0.99 Apple charges for all its tracks. Before the launch of Amazon MP3, Apple also charged a $0.30 premium for tracks in the iTunes Plus format, which is recorded at a higher quality than the DRM-encumbered versions. Other Amazon tracks sell for $0.99.
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Amazon.com will start selling MP3 music files through its international Web sites this year.
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Amazon announces that it will add music from Sony BMG to its Amazon MP3 digital music download service.
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UK retail giant Tesco has decided to launch its own online music store, complete with downloads from thousands of artists and one of the most open sharing schemes on the Internet.
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Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said on  Thursday its digital music store will now offer songs from Sony  BMG Music Entertainment without copy-protection technology, or  digital rights management.
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Record labels including Universal and SonyBMG have begun selling music through a new download service.