A victory for making customers delighted to give you money, Amazon applies common sense to selling music and offers DRM-free digital music files, with no restrictions on which physical devices you use them on. David Card, an analyst at JupiterResearch reports: Other Shoe Drops: Amazon to Launch Digital Music Sales
this is a big, big deal, and a critical entrant into the digital music space. Amazon knows how to sell music, what it sells will run on any PC or device — including iPods — without copying or burning restrictions, and it’s (presumably) laying down the law on DRM and formats. Of course its catalog will be crippled at least initially, and it will have a difficult time making money on $1 or thereabouts sales. However, Amazon’s a master of upselling, and has zero customer acquisition costs. It should do just as well as any other store, likely better.
From the NY Times story:
Amazon, the Internet’s most successful seller of physical CDs, today announced plans to introduce a music download store later this year, selling songs and albums in the MP3 format without the anti-copying protection used by most online music retailers.
Selling songs as MP3 files means that customers can transfer their music without limits to any computer, cellphone or music playing device, including Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s Zune.
The music will be from a major label, EMI, and 12,000 smaller independent music companies that have chosen not to use the copy-restricting software known as digital rights management, or D.R.M.“We are offering a great selection of music that our customers love in a way they clearly desire, which is D.R.M.-free, so they can play it on any device they own today or in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media.
TechCruch heaps on the bigger implications of the snowballing trend:
It’s a great step forward for consumers. Having every song and album available exclusively in the MP3 format and DRM-free will mean no more hassles with compatibility and ownership. Buyers will know that once they buy the music, they own the music and are free to use it on anything, anywhere for personal use.
The decision is also another step in bringing down the DRM wall. There may have been a lot of interest and discussion in relation to Apple’s announcement in April, but it’s easily forgotten that as the most popular destination for legal digital music, Apple is also the biggest seller of DRM infected music. Amazon selling only DRM-free music sends a message that a leading retailer is willing to back consumers over big business and that a digital music business can be built and continued using only DRM-free products.
You mean a strategy of making customer happy and able to use whatever they’ve bought on whatever device they choose might might actually make good business sense? Stay tuned as more music retailers and device manufacturers continue to board this cluetrain. Score another point for Amazon’s competitive advantage of delivering superior customer experiences.
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