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Amazon MP3 Adds Warner Music Group Catalog Amazon on Thursday announced the release of new music on its Amazon MP3 music download service, through an agreement with Warner Music Group (WMG). Now users can download Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free music from artists including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Madonna and Metallica. Amazon bills its MP3 service as 'the Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads.' At about 2.9 million songs, Amazon MP3's catalog is less than half the size of Apple's iTunes Store, although many of the songs offered through the iTunes Store employ DRM protection. The songs offered through Amazon MP3 play on almost all digital music players, including Apple's iPods. And while the WMG artists on Amazon MP3 are available via the iTunes Store as well, Amazon indicates that it will make available WMG album bundles containing exclusive tracks. Most songs offered through Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 to 99 cents, with most albums priced from $5.99 to $9.99. All music is encoded at 256 Kbps. From PC World/Macworld By Peter Cohen 
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 interesting. it's always good to have options.[Edited 12/28/07 13:07pm] "Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you." - Kahlil Gibran | |
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I find it interesting that they only have 5 P albums: PR, Parade, The Hits/The B-Sides, The Hits 2, and The Very Best Of. All of the rest of MIA. The weird part about all of it is that "The Very Best of" is 10.99 and The Hits/The B-sides is $9.99 for all 3 discs. [Edited 12/28/07 20:27pm] **--••--**--••**--••--**--••**--••--**--••**--••-
U 'gon make me shake my doo loose! http://www.twitter.com/nivlekbrad | |
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daPrettyman said: I find it interesting that they only have 5 P albums: PR, Parade, The Hits/The B-Sides, The Hits 2, and The Very Best Of. All of the rest of MIA. The weird part about all of it is that "The Very Best of" is 10.99 and The Hits/The B-sides is $9.99 for all 3 discs.
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Another story on this...Prince can't be very happy about this development...
As of last Friday, Warner M. Group (the M stands for madness) handed over 2.9 million tracks — their entire catalog — to Amazon.com’s MP3 service. The tracks can be bought and downloaded for 89 cents. Because they’re not protected by DRM, Digital Rights Management, the songs — by everyone from The Eagles to Prince, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin — can then be copied and redistributed to anyone, anywhere. They will play on any MP3 player. They can be burned, ripped and reproduced -- all for free. For WMG’s chief Edgar Bronfman, this is called a strategy. It’s also called schizophrenia. You see, last Feb. 8, Bronfman gave speech decrying the end of DRM. "We advocate the continued use of DRM," he told a conference. "The notion that music does not deserve the same protection as software, film, video games or other intellectual property, simply because there is an unprotected legacy product in the physical world, is completely without logic or merit." OK, so he lied. What else is new? WMG’s stock is at $6.10 Monday morning. It reached a new low -- below $6 -- last week, rebounded a little and may yet take a further dive today. Bronfman has killed Warner Music and pretty much set fire to the record business. It’s a legacy that can’t be beat. What happened here? One theory is that he wanted to thwart Apple’s iTunes — which still carries DRM on most tracks and prevents their downloaded music from being easily transferred to other systems. Another is that he was taking a cue from Universal Music, which gave a lot of their music to Amazon earlier this year. Either way, Bronfman has clearly demonstrated he doesn’t care one whit about the legacy artists who are stuck with WMG for life. Many of them — especially those on Atlantic/Rhino — are dependent on CD sales for mechanical royalties. The bulk of that group didn’t write their own songs, so CD sales are still important. By turning over the catalog without DRM, Bronfman has ensured that CD sales will almost instantly dry up and turn to dust. At the same time, he’s carved the greatest-hits albums of his artists into 89 cent singles. If you wanted one or two hits in the past, you had to buy an entire album. Now more than ever, even with iTunes, the albums are divisible. Now, the songs can be redistributed at will, over and over. Atlantic’s late chief, Ahmet Ertegun, is no doubt rolling in his grave. In particular, his R&B stars — from Ruth Brown to Sam & Dave to the Drifters — will suffer the most. I can’t imagine that the lawyers for Eric Clapton, Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Prince and so on, can be happy about any of this. Without DRM, those acts can also kiss off their own future CD sales. Even if they were minor, they were something. Now only the Beatles remain absent from the legal downloading world. I can’t see one reason why they would want to give in at this point. Better to make fans buy their CDs than diminish their own recorded catalog. We don’t mourn artists because we knew them. We mourn them because they helped us know ourselves. | |
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