February 16th, 2006
Amazon to Launch Music Download Service and MP3 Player
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
I have been a huge fan of subscription music services - especially Yahoo Music. It makes no sense to pay by the song unless you truly love and have to own it for life, and subscription services have always offered the ability to own individual tunes or albums for less that the iTunes price. What’s not to love? Today Amazon anounced it was getting into the field with not only a music service but a branded MP3 player as well.
The WSJ reports that the online retailer is considering a subscription-based service supported by a cheap, Amazon-branded portable player. It states Amazon believes that deploying the subscription model will set it apart from Apple, despite the failure of Napster’s, RealNetworks’ and Yahoo!’s subscription services to make much of an impact on iTunes’ market dominance.
Samsung is being touted as a possible partner on the hardware side, touted as having the ‘flair for stylish design’ necessary to provide an alternative to the iPod. Whether Amazon would continue to sell iPods, which regularly feature among its top 10 electronics products both in the UK and the US, is not known. WSJ via PCPro
We Say: It’s a very crowded market and Amazon is late to the party, but it does have 55 million users and that music recommendation technology that could be interesting if used properly in this field. Lauch a price war and it could be a win.
David Johnston says:
Amazon will have to do a lot of catching up, but their reccomendation software and consumer reviews will help greatly and are more advanced/superior to iTunes. It’s ironic that Apple and Amazon have been partners recently, with Apple iPods and PC’s getting premium space in search results and browsing. I wonder if that’ll change when they become competitors
February 16th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Bill King says:
Interesting. I wonder what sort of DRM scheme they’ll be going through. (Of major interest to me, as I own a creative mp3 player, and here at work, we’re only implementing the OMA DRM schema for qtopia, altho, phone vendors could then go off and implement their own choice of drm on top of the helix(by real) backend we’re using).
February 16th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
stradicaster says:
Heeyy. Last.fm is on for this. Bad for last.fm.
February 17th, 2006 at 6:42 am
ClapekDodki says:
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July 16th, 2007 at 6:36 am
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May 11th, 2008 at 10:56 pm