| Amazon set to join music download market |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Thursday, 17 May 2007 | |
  
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"[Amazon has] been an important retail partner of ours, and we are delighted they will be offering consumers EMI's new premium DRM-free downloads in their new digital music store," said EMI CEO Eric Nicoli. When EMI announced the iTunes Store would be selling higher quality and unprotected versions of its music at a premium price, it said similar terms would be offered to other music retailers. The steadily increasing storage capacity of portable players, personal computers and even mobile phones means it is no longer necessary to compress tracks so severely, and that results in better audio quality. Whether that improvement is discernible under typical listening conditions is another matter. What's more important to most buyers is the ability to use a purchased track on practically any device they own and (in the case of computers) using whichever software they prefer. Until EMI made the leap, all the major record companies insisted that download services used some kind of DRM, but there was no single standard. So music from the iTunes Store could not be used on a Zune or a Zen, and tracks purchased from a store using Microsoft's DRM (such as BigPond Music) could not be used on the market-leading iPod range. "Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO. "We're excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone." No indication was given of the pricing structure to be used by Amazon. The large record companies are known to favour higher prices for the latest music, something Apple's iTunes Store has so far resisted.{moscomment} |
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