Stan Beer
Monday, 28 January 2008 04:54
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Armed with DRM-free MP3 downloads from all four major music labels, Amazon MP3 the digital music store of Amazon.com has announced that it will take its store international this year. Currently, Amazon MP3, which was launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, is only available to US residents and the announcement to go international puts further pressure on Apple's dominant iTunes store.
To date Apple, which has had at times a rocky
relationship with the big four music companies mainly over pricing, has
not been able to forge a DRM-free deal with the three biggest labels,
Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Bros, after announcing a deal with EMI
in April 2007.
The EMI arrangement saw higher quality DRM-free
256Kbps AAC tracks offered for sale on iTunes for US$1.29 compared to
the lower quality 128Kbps AAC tracks restricted by Apple's Fairplay DRM
for US$0.99. The DRM-free tracks can be copied to and played on any
device capable of playing AAC without restriction while the Fairplay
tracks can only be played on Apple's iPod, a Macintosh or PC computer,
or burned to a CD up to five times.
After Amazon launched Amazon
MP3, it became obvious that the major music labels were making a
concerted effort to break the dominance of iTunes, which commands an
estimated 80% market share of legal music downloads. While Apple's
insistence on maintaining the 99c price tag on all its tracks had been
reported to be a sticking point with the record companies, Amazon MP3
offers 256Kbps DRM-free MP3 tracks for US$0.89 to US$0.99 from all four
labels.
A clear differentiator between the Amazon music store
and iTunes is its use of the MP3 format as opposed to Apple's AAC.
While AAC is generally considered to produce better sound quality
playback than MP3 at the same bit rate, MP3 is widely regarded as a
universal standard and, unlike AAC, MP3 tracks are playable on
virtually all devices that can play digital recordings, including
mobile phones.
