Amazon.com Launches Amazon MP3, Selling DRM-Free MP3 Downloads

By Amit Chowdhry ● Sep 25, 2007

Amazon.com officially launched Amazon MP3 today, an online store that sells over 2 million songs from over 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels. All of these MP3s do not contain DRM (digital rights management) software. This already provides a competitive advantage and incentive to use Amazon over iTunes. When purchasing a song from iTunes, a user is limited to what they can do with the song.

“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,” stated Bill Carr, Amazon.com’s VP 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.”

Most of the songs are priced from $0.89-$0.99. The top 100 best-selling songs are generally marked as $0.89 on Amazon MP3. Most albums are from $5.99-$9.99 on Amazon MP3 as well.

Amazon is also utilizing 1-Click shopping technology that allows users to seamlessly add MP3s to Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, etc. Amazon MP3 could drastically effect shopping for CDs in stores and we will probably see a lot of iTunes’ song purchasing market-share get taken away from them.