At the start of April EMI and Apple announced that they were going to sell non-DRM’ed songs through iTMS. Now Amazon is going to launch their own DRM-free music store later this year:
Amazon dropped the bomb today by announcing its DRM-free music store. The previously-rumored store will be launched sometime “later this year” and offer unprotected MP3 files for purchase. The Amazon music store, which does not appear to have a name yet, will offer “millions” of songs from over 12,000 record labels.
Predictably, EMI has offered its own catalog to Amazon. Just last month, the music label announced that it would begin selling DRM-free tracks through the iTunes Store, making EMI the first major label to forego file protections. At that time, EMI emphasized that the DRM-free deal wasn’t iTunes-exclusive and that the company was looking to expand its partnerships to other music sites as well.
Let’s see how much longer it will be until the remaining 3 big labels are going to cave in. I also wonder if this will push Apple to get rid of their silly dual pricing structure for DRM’ed/DRM-free tracks. And who knows, Apple might even start selling mp3’s.
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