Amazon's DRM-free music store creeping up on iTunes
Thu Mar 27, 2008 5:15AM EDT
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Apple's dominant iTunes music store might have been first out of the gates with big-label, DRM-free music, but Amazon—now armed with more than twice as many copy protection-free songs as iTunes—is quickly closing the gap.
It doesn't sound like iTunes is in immediate danger of losing its digital music sales crown—Apple claims it owns 80 percent of the digital music market—but Amazon's rapid progress must be pretty startling to Cupertino.
While Apple was the first major music retailer to start selling copy protection-free music from a major label (it announced a deal with EMI last April), it stumbled almost immediately by charging a 30-cent premium for DRM-free songs.
Apple finally dropped prices in the face of DRM-free competition from the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon, but the damage was arguably done.
Meanwhile, Amazon got a leg up courtesy of Warner, Sony, and Universal, all of whom have been looking for a way to wrest some control back from iTunes and its virtual digital music monopoly.
All three signed DRM-free deals with Amazon—but not with Apple, meaning that Amazon's DRM-free catalog has swelled to about 4.5 million songs, compared to just 2 million for iTunes (according to Yahoo! News).
It's pretty ironic that the big music labels—which have, in the past, been morbidly afraid of piracy and digital music in general—have resorted to selling DRM-free music to get back at Apple.
But hey, it works for us music lovers who get to reap the benefits of all the competition.
Related:
Amazon takes on Apple with copy-protection-free music [Yahoo! News]
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2 Posted by klacour on Thu Mar 27, 2008 2:55PM EDT Report Abuse
Not only is Amazon's digital music DRM free, it also costs less per track, too. I'm not a big digital music buyer, as I perfer to have CD in hand as a backup, but when I do buy digital music, I may not always go to Amazon (I usually do), but I never go to iTunes. I jumped off that rip-off ride a long time ago. The premium they charged for DRM free clinched the deal. I only use iTune is load music on my iPod. Gvie me a viable alternative to that, and I'll jump completely out of the Apple camp.
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3 Posted by gotkyleh on Thu Mar 27, 2008 3:52PM EDT Report Abuse
wow klacour, iTunes is the best Jukebox ever, I do believe you can use programs like win-amp to manage music on the iPod in a very weak way. And iTunes is better and faster at importing and burning CDs. iTunes is a fantastic jukebox, the iTunes store however is not. The Apple camp is not that bad, if you open your eyes, were lucky to have Apple.
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1 Posted by pwdrskir on Thu Mar 27, 2008 2:48PM EDT Report Abuse
It's about time!!! DRM is not dead as long as the DeathStar (Microsoft) still has it's Zume. The rebels have won a big battle. Yea, geekish, I know, but it's the closet analogy I could conjure.