Geekfoolery

The simplest, most obvious move can often be the boldest.

Amazon.com is now selling plain vanilla MP3 downloads from their web portal. Although the move follows Apple’s deal with EMI to sell DRM-free tracks for 30 cents more earlier this year (Apple’s iTunes Plus tracks are also recorded at a higher bit rate for better sound quality as well), Amazon’s selling unlocked, open format songs as MP3 files is as much a psychological breakthrough as a technical one. And in many (though not all) cases, at 89 cents each Amazon’s MP3s are cheaper even that Apple’s tracks DRMed with their Fairplay system at $1.29.

Apple’s basic pricing–99 cents a song, $9.99 and album–succeeds in its simplicity, and Steve Jobs tells us he’s been fighting the good fight against the record companies who have long wanted variable pricing. The  fear has been that record companies would see 99 cents as a base on which premiums would be added for popular artists. Amazon may be in beta, but the experience there seems to be that higher per-track prices seem to be for longer songs, and album price variations seem to lower prices than standard, not higher.
File formats and pricing aside, I have put 89 of my own hard-earned cents on the line to give the site a try. From the Amazon.com home page, MP3 downloads are listed on the left; the home page features a search field, and lists of most popular artists, albums, and featured content. You can listen to 30 second previews of each track, and each song or artist that you click on brings up pointers to other songs and albums that Amazon thinks you might like based on what other people have bought.

In short, the experience covers all the same bases that buying a song in iTunes has covered in the past. To make a purchase, you need to download the Amazon MP3 Downloader, a small program that takes the .AMZ files that your browser downloads when you buy a song and passes them the Amazon Downloader which downloads the MP3s and loads them into iTunes or Windows Media player. If you already have an account with Amazon, payment is made to you credit card on file.
I have a few minor complaints about the interface. It seems like you can’t load up a shopping cart and throw stuff back later–when you choose to buy, the Amazon Downloader starts up right away. Some of the areas I clicked when browsing ended up as dead ends. But overall, the site worked well.

Amazon’s approach with non-DRMed MP3s, their universal brand-recognition, and built-in customer base could make Amazon the first real contender to take on the iTunes Music Store–an arena already littered with corpses of many who have tried to sell legal digital downloads and failed.

A successful Amazon store may break the virtual monopoly held by the iTMS on legal music downloads. The resulting competition should be good for the marketplace, pushing both sides to compete on features and price.

But it also possible that the battle to sell digital music over the Internet may be over before either side really begins to fight. In addition to the moves by the major labels to allow iTMS, Amazon, and even the Zune Marketplace to sell songs without DRM, some bands are realizing that their music is not actually their main product. Radiohead is giving their music on their website, a move that Canadian artist Jane Siberry started a few years ago. Prince gave away millions of his new CD in a Sunday newspaper. Blues Traveler has downloads of their live shows on their website.
More and more the bands and following grudglingly along are the record companies in coming to the realization that the music is just the free sample, the demo, of the product that there is to be sold. Concerts, t-shirts, hats, and other ancillary merchandise stand to be a greater source of revenue than CDs.

Go back nearly a decade to when MP3s first started finding their way onto our hard drives, and the first time you opened Napster and went crazy. For a brief moment, I thought the recording industry would see a file-sharing network as the gold mine of information that it could have been. Here was tool that could recording execs what bands were hot, with which group, in which geographical area. You could see which songs were getting buzz, and you could see which unsigned bands were gaining a following. Record companies were paying radio stations big bucks to push bands on the air, and they still do; file sharing could have replaced that system.

We all know what the RIAA chose to do instead. Push draconian anti-piracy laws through congress. Unleash the legal hounds on teens and grandmas with insane lawsuits. Put a variety of software locks on their products that have done nothing to prevent piracy.

Amazon’s new MP3 downloads are a sign that we might–we just might be entering a new era in digital music.

Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us Digg Reddit

Comments:

Comments RSS

Leave a comment