Amazon store selling unrestricted music
seattle -- Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying.
The store, Amazon MP3, lets shoppers buy and download individual songs or entire albums. The tracks can be copied to multiple computers, burned onto CDs and played on most types of PCs and portable devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPod and Microsoft Corp.’s Zune.
Songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents and albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99.
Major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music Publishing have signed on to sell tracks on Amazon, as have thousands of independent labels. The company said several smaller labels were selling their music without copy protection for the first time on the Amazon store, including Rounder Records and Trojan Records.
Amazon’s store competes with Apple’s market-leading iTunes, which is also offering some songs without so-called digital rights management technology, which prevents unauthorized copies from playing.
Although DRM helps stem illegal copying, it can frustrate consumers by limiting the type of device or number of computers on which they can listen to music. Copy-protected songs sold through iTunes generally won’t play on devices other than the iPod, and iPods won’t play DRM-enabled songs bought at rival music stores.
EMusic.com Inc., another popular download site, also sells tracks in the DRM-free MP3 format but, like Amazon’s store, doesn’t offer music from some major labels that require anti- piracy locks.
Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital music, said it would be up to customers to legally use the music they buy.
To help stop music piracy, Carr said, some record labels add a digital watermark to MP3 files that indicate what company sold the song, and Seattle-based Amazon adds its own name and the item number of the song for customer-service purposes. He added that no details about the buyer or the transaction were added to the downloaded music file.
“By and large, most customers just want a great, legitimate way to buy the music they want,” Carr said. “What the vast majority of labels believe is that they will sell more music by giving customers what they want. . . by enabling DRM-free MP3 -- than by continuing to confuse customers or force them to choose methods that are not legal, because the legitimate alternatives are not good.”
Carr characterized the number of record labels that still insisted on copy-protection technology as “a handful.”
Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is owned by Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann, have not agreed to sell music on Amazon MP3. David Card of Jupiter Research said that Universal and EMI had made only parts of their catalogs available.
