Amazon to sell 2,000,000 DRM free MP3
Suffice to say, Hallelujah, i’ve pissed and moaned about my crippled iTunes music for long enough, this is a game changer with some caveats. If it is super easy to use, easy to understand where my media is, and is not too expensive. With amazons experience so far with ecommerce and even digital distribution this could really be it 
This will certainly put Wal-Mart’s DRM free offering in the shade I would imagine.
Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”
Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs™, iPods™, Zunes™, Zens™, iPhones™, RAZRs™, and BlackBerrys™; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes™ or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs.
Via BoingBoing and Engadget
UPDATE: I just bought my first album via Amazon MP3 and i’m pleased to say even on a Mac it was pretty painless and more importantly nothing unexpected happened. I bought the album using 1 click ordering. It gave me a screen telling me I needed to download the Amazon Downloader
The app downloaded and I installed it, it ran automatically and opened a browser window prompting me to download the album, which then started getting downloaded by the app
and the result? It created a new folder called Amazon MP3 in my music folder, then the artist, then the album, filled with lovely little 256kbps mp3’s, then iTunes opened up and started copying the songs. Pretty sweet.
Now i’m listening to Amy Winehouse “Rehab”, such and ironic song.
Of course the only thing that would make this even better would be a Amazon S3 driven bottomless storage option that would enable all my devices access to my library, and of course would enable streaming of all my stuff to my friends ALA iTunes.
UPDATE: Gizmodo is reporting that Amazon MP3’s are watermarked to identify they came from Amazon, but not with personal identifying information like iTunes DRM “free” songs are.
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
DC1974
I guess. Is Amazon even important anymore? I can’t remember the last time I shopped there. There site is a UI disaster. Their prices kinda suck. Shipping seems to take forever unless you pay for it. And their return policies are tiered and make little sense, especially for electronics. I don’t even bother with them anymore. They are the Wal-Mart of the web space but without their strong merchandizing experience. I prefer to shop at specialty retailers anyway — so I was never really the right target audience anyway. I grew up in a small suburban midwestern town — and didn’t go to a big box retailer until I was easily in my teens. I’ve never liked one shop fits all (or none) concepts.
When you are huge, you don’t have to care if people like you. I suppose.
Sep 25th, 2007
Karl
Wow, that’s really interesting. I still shop at amazon fairly regularly, especially for books, video games and hard to find things. I just ordered 4 books from them yesterday in fact. I signed up for that amazon prime thing so I get overnight shipping for 3.99.
I agree that there UI is not great, unless you find something via search you’re going to have a hell of a time drilling down, primarily a navigation problem. They have no idea how to do faceted navigation
Sep 25th, 2007
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