The online retail giant Amazon has officially launched its much anticipated online MP3 music store, doing away with the infamous restrictive DRM technology. Unlike other DRM-free music services that mainly offer music from independent labels, Amazon's store also includes music from two of the four major record labels, EMI and Universal Music Group, who both finally recently decided to try making DRM-free music available online. Warner and Sony BMG may later make their music available without DRM if the decision by these becomes a success.
Amazon's online store features a library of over 2 million songs in the MP3 format at a bit rate of 256kbps, consisting of around 180,000 artists and over 20,000 labels. Most tracks are priced at 89 to 99 cents per track and full albums are sold with significant discounts at $4.99 to $9.99 per album, with the top 100 singles selling at $0.89 each and the high chart albums selling at $8.99 each. While Apple also offers music from EMI in the DRM-free AAC format, they charge a higher price of $1.29 per DRM-free track, thus giving Amazon a competitive edge. Its music will natively play on any MP3 player, including the iPod, Zune, Walkman, Zen and any other MP3 compatible player.
While there are many competitors to Apple, all the music stores that sell music from the major labels infect their music with DRM. DRM was originally designed to restrict what consumers can do with their music to prevent unauthorised distribution, but also has the major side effect of limiting what players one can play their music on. For example, most of the music sold on iTunes will only natively play on an iPod, while music from Microsoft's Zune market place can only be played on the Zune media player. These two players will not play DRM-infected music bought from any other online music service, at least without circumventing the copy protection, not to mention the legal issues of doing so!
This is where stores selling DRM-free music have the competitive advantage, since their music can be played or legally converted to play on virtually every digital music player on the market.
