Amazon.com opens new market to sell digital music. The new market will be available later this year.
Amazon.com is the world's largest Internet retailer, it already sells books, movies, CDs, games, and now it is going to sale digital music.
"We think our customers will be excited," said Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president of digital media. "We are already the largest online CD retailer. Now we are offering that customer base digital downloads."
Now the largest digital music retailer is iTunes that belong to Apple Inc., so Amazon.com's entrance to the market will be a challenge for it.
Analytics are discussing this question actively to predict if this innovation of Amazon.com will beat Apple or not. The two retailers are offering totally different kinds of services:
- Apple's iTunes are encoded with digital rights management software, which means that the digital music bought from Apple's site can be played only on iPods, digital music players provided by Apple.
- But Amason.com is going to sell music free from digital rights management software, which means, that the music can be played on any digital music player device provided by any of the manufacturers.
This somehow means that music bought from Amazon.com can be copied without any copyright permission, but at the same time, this gives a choice to the customer to choose any music player device and by music from any retailer.
Amazon.com's new feature will bring huge sales of digital music, since there are a plenty of music player devices, which don't sell their own DRM music. The users need DRM free music. On the other side, since Apple's iPods are the best sold music players, their owners will still keep buying music from iTunes with less prices.
We already do have an example of Amazon.com's entrance into market when it started selling movie downloads. But still it didn't beat Apple's market, that is also a TV and movie download retailer.
Digital rights management free tracks will cost 30 cents more than copy-restricted ones, which cost 99 cents per track. Amazon.com has already signed agreements with 12,000 record labels to sell their digital music without DRM, but it hasn't still signed contracts with three major labels Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music Group.
By Ruzan Harutyunyan for HULIQ
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