Amazon MP3 Store to go International This Year

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Since Amazon launched their online music store last September, they've done a great job of getting the attention they need, from both consumers and record companies alike. They now carry music from all four of the major labels and offer over 3 million songs, given them a steep advantage over iTunes and other competitors.

As it stands though, the service is available in the US only, but later this year, the service will be available internationally. Once that happens, Amazon's name should become synonymous with online music sales rather quickly. They will have more music than anyone and will sell each track for market-standard prices... sounds good to me. As a Linux user, I don't have much choice with regards to downloadable music, so I am looking forward to being able to use this service myself. They seem to be doing everything right. I just hope it keeps that way.

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Amazon currently provides 3.3M songs from 270,000+ artists, encoded at 256kbps, and priced anywhere between 89 and 99 cents each. Things are similar with iTunes Plus, Apple's DRM-free music collection: songs are 99 cents each and encoded at 256kbps. However, Apple only provides "up to 2 million iTunes Plus songs" in comparison to Amazon's 3.3M, giving the latter company a substantial edge with its scope.

Source: TechCrunch
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[MacMan]

PLEASE NOTE: Apple's iTunes has over 5,000,000 songs in it's library, but only 2,000,000 are DRM FREE as opposed to Amazon's 3.3 DRM FREE catalogue.

As Tom Reestman's been pointing out in his excellent and very popular blog: http://thesmallwave.com, the record companies are to blame. Apple wanted all of it's songs DRM FREE, but the record companies said NO, they could never do it! Then, after saying so, they offered Amazon what they refused to offer iTunes on a silver platter.

Their goal: break iTunes which they say has too much control; they don't like the idea of selling tracks for as little as 99 cents; they want complete albums sold, not individual tracks - selecting them is great for the customer, but bad for the record companies.

If they succeed in their illegal act (yes, collusion to control and fix prices is illegal!) it will be we, the customers, who will pay. What they are offering Amazon is a short deal proposition. As soon as they feel iTunes is no longer a threat, as Tom points out, they will raise the prices, stop individual track sales and selections, and clamp down on DRM ENABLED tracks once again!

The record companies, as in this article: http://thesmallwave.com/2007/11/27/universal-ceo-tries-being-candid-and-scares-me/ are totally out of their minds, and if I were Steve Jobs I would sue the greedy pants off of them and have them charged with collusion to hurt or kill iTunes. Apple despite the route of their stock price due to panic in the market over the credit and other economic crises', Apple is still bigger than all of the record companies combine, Amazon too, and with no debt and record sales and 18 billion dollars in cash reserves, Apple and iTunes is hardly going to sit by while the record companies illegally act in collusion to hurt iTunes in their monopolistic action to screw the customer. iTunes took the illegal act of downloading from p2p for free and made it into a legitimate and profitable business. The record companies should be thanking iTunes, not trying to damage it by illegally giving Amazon an advantage that Apple championed in the fist place!