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The Internet Media Music

Amazon to Open DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store 197

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-to-share dept.
mtnlion1 writes "Amazon.com announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices and burn songs to CDs for personal use."
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Amazon to Open DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store More

Amazon to Open DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store

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  • You will not be missed.

    • Re:Goodbye ITunes Store (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HawkinsD ( 267367 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:11AM (#19159223)
      You know, I'm about as big of an Apple fanboi as you're likely to meet... But even I am excited about this, and am hopeful that it's the beginning of a change in the industry.

      And it could be even bigger: If the music industry can start treating their customers like clients, instead of vermin, then perhaps there's hope for the airlines (motto: we fucking HATE our customers).

      A boy can dream.

  • Premium? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by niceone ( 992278 ) * on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:07AM (#19159177) Journal
    From TFA:

    Eric Nicoli, EMI CEO: "They have been an important retail partner of ours, and we are delighted they will be offering consumers EMI's new premium DRM-free downloads in their new digital music store..."

    Hmm, what does the word "premium" mean in there? More expensive? Just some subset of their catalog?

    • Re:Premium? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mateo_LeFou ( 859634 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:13AM (#19159239) Homepage
      I believe 'premium content', as used by the ahem 'content industry', means "content that we need to recoup advertising dollars on"

    • Re:Premium? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dogtanian ( 588974 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:22AM (#19159353) Homepage

      Hmm, what does the word "premium" mean in there? More expensive? Just some subset of their catalog?
      Oh, I fucking *hate* that word now. It's been devalued by tossers in marketing who'll slap it on anything to give them an air of luxury and use it as an excuse to charge a lot more for marginally better (at best) products.

      It's one of those words like "heritage" that has been soiled by its overuse in certain contexts.

    • Re:Premium? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cathoderoytube ( 1088737 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:26AM (#19159399)
      Non premium songs are displayed in the form of sheet music, and can be played an unlimited number of times, provided that number is 5. Songs may only be played on RIAA approved Xylophones, which can be leased at $70 a month.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ediron2 ( 246908 ) *
        Wicked funny. One suggested edit: RIAA-approved musical instruments with names ending in -phone (saxophone, xylophone, sousaphone)...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Omsil98 ( 989548 )
      "Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices and burn songs to CDs for personal use." I love how we as a society now have to specify that our MP3s are "DRM-free" just like we do with food products. Steroid-free, DDT-free, pesticide-free... And then they go on to specify all the wonderful capabilities of DRM-free MP3s.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I cringe when I read phases like "our consumers".

      Consumers - mindless drones, who have a singular purpose (to consume)
      Customers - that's a little better.

      "our consumers" - the people (yes, people) who are put here to consume our products (and this time they will pay a premium to do so!)

  • I am left to wonder.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Churla ( 936633 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:07AM (#19159187)
    I wonder what strings they were able to pull to get this moving faster/better than iTunes has... hurm....

    Will it only be music from the EMI catalog?

    They have the section of their site where individuals can sell things as "used" , will they expand this so that unsigned bands can sell their MP3's without a recording label behind them?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 192939495969798999 ( 58312 )
      The 'used' section couldn't support mp3 sales... how would you tell if a 'metallica.mp3' file was really used or not? Basically if they allowed the used section to exist, all their profits from 'new' sales would immediately disappear as 80 zillion kids upload "used" mp3's for sale for 1 cent.

      • Re:I am left to wonder.... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Churla ( 936633 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:17AM (#19159311)
        What I meant was more if they would modify the end user selling something functions they have already. (i.e. the "buy new and used from...") to allow for end users such as bands to sell their own original MP3's over amazon.

        This would be a huge boon for local unsigned and independent bands as they could have people just look them up on amazon. A band could have it's own website, which links to amazon to sell the MP3's , saving them bandwidth costs, and the need to manage/deal with e-commerce on a promotional website, while also allowing them to make money from the sale of their music.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teslar ( 706653 )

      Will it only be music from the EMI catalog?
      Apparently not. From TFA (big orange headline):

      Amazon.com to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store with Songs and Albums from EMI Music and More Than 12,000 Other Labels

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Churla ( 936633 )
        Yes, but if it's EMI + 12,000 labels that are hosted out of someone's garage then it's basically just EMI... The question would be which of the other big labels will get on this train. And if they did, they would have been mentioned by name I would believe.
        • Why does it matter if they have the big labels. Most of the stuff put out by the big labels is repetitive drivel, made to sound just right as to not offend anyone so they have the chance of the most people buying it. There's plenty of good music from independent labels. Money doesn't make good music, good musicians make good music.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Churla ( 936633 )
            Yes, but volume sales make online music stores viable. Keeping the stores viable opens up the door for independents to use them as well.

            As much as the "great music" may be from smaller artists and labels, if the profits don't roll for Amazon on a venture they can and will pull the plug. Having the widest possible selection would be optimal for highest volume. Even if it means also having crappy choices.

            But of course, to each their own on tastes and preference.

    • I wonder what strings they were able to pull to get this moving faster/better than iTunes has... hurm....

      Oh, I'm sure the recording industry is ecstatic to have another major player in the licensed-music-download arena. Until now, Apple has in some ways had the recording industry by the cojones -- as the major retailer of song downloads, Jobs has been able to tell the industry to STFU re: variable pricing. With Amazon in the mix, the labels have a *huge* bargaining chip, since they can tell Jobs to take a

      • All it would take is a big label saying "We're taking all our top-100 artists away from ITMS because Amazon is allowing us to charge $2.00 per song (DRM'd) instead of $1.00.
        Should be "Amazon is willingo to charge $2.29 per song (non-DRM'd) instead of $1.29."

  • Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:13AM (#19159241)
    OK seriously, are people going to live in the past forever? While I don't intend on getting rid of the mp3's I do have, it isn't mp3's that people should be making, and especially, buying, now. MP4/AAC has been around for a while now, and there is no excuse for non-WMA stores to not be selling it... the quality at any given bitrate is significantly better... and even if you can't notice it because of poor ears, a poor audio system, or just general lack of caring... it's the future.

    As for people saying things like "Goodbye iTunes"... why do you think this is any different than what iTunes is doing? iTunes is adding the EMI catalog plus a ton of independant labels (and of course, the other big ones as long as they sign on. Why do you think the Amazon store is any different? I think you can pretty much rest assured that near-everything Amazon gets will be on iTunes... and I have a hard time imagining that anything Amazon releases could beat the integration and ease of use of iTunes and iTunes Music Store... and from there, the iPod.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zootm ( 850416 )

      People don't get rid of MP3s because they're still the lowest common denominator of music file formats. Everything plays them, unlike AAC or Vorbis or WMA or whatever else.

      It would be nice to have the option to choose a format that suited the user, though. Presumably the only reason they've not done that is to avoid confusion (Apple can offer AAC as their "only choice" since they only support iTunes and iPods).

      • No the only reason they haven't done it would be the terabytes of extra space that would be required to store the same music twice or three times. True, with a little imagination and a small supercomputing cluster they could rip music on demand to a different format... ...Or just throw the music out there in the lowest-common denominator format and know that audio-snobs will order the CD, and everyone else will either deal with the music in it's present form, rip it into the flavor of their choosing, or be

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 )
      Likewise, there is no excuse for devices and stores to not support OGG Vorbis.

      Really, why wouldn't you want to use a high quality, patent free codec? MP3 and AAC are patent infested, though AAC is slightly better (with mp3 you have to pay to sell mp3s).
      • Actually no, AAC is completely patent unencumbered.

        • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:4, Informative)

          by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:24AM (#19160259)
          From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

          Licensing and patents

          As with the MP3 format [3] , no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format. [4] This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format for distributing content, particularly streaming content (such as Internet radio).

          However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs. [5] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement.

          AAC requires a patent license, and thus uses proprietary technology. But contrary to popular belief, it is not the property of a single company, having been developed in a standards-making organization.

      • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:49AM (#19159665)
        Well, as far as devices goes, here's the reasoning. Because it's currently very expensive (or impossible?) to get chip decoders for OGG Vorbis, because of lack of demand. So, the other option for decoding OGG Vorbis is a generic processor, which if you want one with enough power also costs extra dollars, and requires a lot of extra electricity. In the small-is-good, and our-player-plays-for-54-hours world of portable music players, supporting tons of formats isn't the best idea. Supporting the one format that everybody uses is the best idea.

        • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:4, Informative)

          by yuna49 ( 905461 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:03AM (#19159853)
          Seems like Cowon [cowonglobal.com] (aka iAudio) has figured these problems out. Many of their players support Ogg and FLAC. I nag them from time to time to add Matroska to the list of formats their video players support.
          • It's much easier to do with a portable video player because you can charge a lot more, and you're going to need the processing power to decode the video anyway. You can also charge a lot more for the player because it does a lot more for the consumer. But for most portable music only players, it's still a lot of trouble to add Ogg Vorbis support.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by yuna49 ( 905461 )
              It's not just the video players. Just picking one at random, the flash-based iAudio T2 supports Ogg and FLAC and sells for about $100.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by glwtta ( 532858 )
            I'm pretty sure the A3 supports Matroska (still a horrible name).

        • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:5, Informative)

          by mgpeter ( 132079 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:29AM (#19160355) Homepage

          Because it's currently very expensive (or impossible?) to get chip decoders for OGG Vorbis, because of lack of demand.

          That may have been true a few years ago, but most of the current Portable Media Players are more than capable of handling the decoding of OGG files and would be pretty trivial to add support to their players. I really think their is a more of a "politcal" reason for not supporting OGG files anymore (not sure what it is, but for some reason companies don't want OGG files catching on).

          BTW: I just purchased a Sandisk Sansa e260 series player to be used with my entire collection of OGG Vorbis files - the trick is to simply install Rockbox [rockbox.org] on it to use instead of the crap firmware it comes with.

          • I really think their is a more of a "politcal" reason for not supporting OGG files anymore (not sure what it is, but for some reason companies don't want OGG files catching on).

            So, are you saying there is some sort of conspiracy between music player makers and the fraunhofer institute to keep ogg support off players? I don't buy that for a second. For me there can be no doubt that ogg is more expensive to support, or all players would support it.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mgpeter ( 132079 )

              So, are you saying there is some sort of conspiracy between music player makers and the fraunhofer institute to keep ogg support off players? For me there can be no doubt that ogg is more expensive to support, or all players would support it.

              Then what other reason do you give why ipods, sansas, gigabeats, etc. don't support OGG files out of the box (while rockbox happily runs on these devices) ? It would be very minimal (price wise and man-power wise) for these companies to support OGG files as their

        • Theoretically, a store could use the mp3PRO [wikipedia.org] format to get the best of all worlds, couldn't they? A 128 bps mp3PRO file would play on every MP3-compatible device with quality comparable to MP3. And any device (like the PC, or a media center of some kind) which is mp3PRO-aware would automatically play them with superior sound quality.

          From the end-user's point of view, I think this would be an awesome idea. But then again, the format doesn't have a very good track record of adoption so far, and there may be

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) *
        No one has really ever verified the assertion that Ogg Vorbis is not covered by any patents. The patent situation for Vorbis is a big unknown whereas it is well established for MP3 and AAC (and WMA for manufacturers that use it). If a big manufacturer researched Vorbis' patent situation and found it infringed on some patents somewhere they would have spent all that time and money for nothing. If they avoid Vorbis all together it costs them nothing. An insignificant number of people even know what Ogg Vorbis
    • The patents on the MP3 codec are going to expire in a few years. The same cannot be said for the other codecs you mentioned. When the MP3-related patents expire Amazon can encode music without paying royalties and MP3 player manufacturers can make MP3 players without paying royalties. Whether the cost savings get passed to customers is another matter, but there is a soon-to-be-realised financial incentive associated with sticking to the MP3 codec.

      The other good thing about the patents on MP3 expiring is of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      OK seriously, are people going to live in the past forever? While I don't intend on getting rid of the mp3's I do have, it isn't mp3's that people should be making, and especially, buying, now. MP4/AAC has been around for a while now, and there is no excuse for non-WMA stores to not be selling it... the quality at any given bitrate is significantly better... and even if you can't notice it because of poor ears, a poor audio system, or just general lack of caring... it's the future.

      In a casual conversation,
    • Because Amazon sells far more than just music.

      They can cross promote, buy the CD, get the MP3's for a discount and have them while the CD ships... Buy a movie, get the MP3's of the soundtrack bundled in...

      Searching for information on learning classical spanish guitar? Here are a dozen books, a couple CD's, and oh yeah, some MP3 examples of greats in the field...

      On another level, this is the difference between WarMart expanding it's electronics to also sell HDTV, and Best Buy expanding it's selection to do

    • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:39AM (#19159507) Journal
      As for people saying things like "Goodbye iTunes"... why do you think this is any different than what iTunes is doing?

      Because many of us, myself included, will not, ever, intall iTunes or use the iTMS.

      Amazon, OTOH, as evil as we may all consider Bezos' 1-click patent, has the right idea. When you buy digital media from them (or if you buy physical items with a digital manual), it just goes into your account's Media Library. Totally platform (as well as specific-machine) agnostic; If you can run a web browser on any machine anywhere in the world, you can log into your Amazon account and download what you have in your account (and as many times as you want).



      I have a hard time imagining that anything Amazon releases could beat the integration and ease of use of iTunes and iTunes Music Store... and from there, the iPod.

      Exactly - And I don't want any of the three of those, much less all three.

      Not to mention the obvious Slashdot cry of protest, "iTunes on Linux?"
      • It's not iTunes that bothers me
        (the gapfree playback is a lot better than others)
        it's that POS quicktime that you need to install.

        Amarok and Winamp can both play AAC/M4A with just the codec.

        I'm guessing it's DRM related.

        • You need Quicktime because iTunes uses Quicktime's audio and video playback engines. If you want to add formats to playback (Ogg Vorbis, for example) in either Quicktime or iTunes, you add the plugin to Quicktime's plugins directory

      • Re:Seriously, MP3 needs to stop. Also, iTunes (Score:5, Funny)

        by tfoss ( 203340 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:16AM (#19160095)

        I have a hard time imagining that anything Amazon releases could beat the integration and ease of use of iTunes and iTunes Music Store... and from there, the iPod.

        Exactly - And I don't want any of the three of those, much less all three.


        Especially ease of use. I hate that.

        -Ted

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmIAnAi ( 975049 ) *
      It's all well and good for someone who is tech literate to say that, but if Amazon are going to make a success of this it has to mean something to the average iPod user - even more so to the millions of cheap MP3 player users. If you start throwing different formats at these people they will just get confused and stay away.

      As for quality, MP3 is sufficient for most of the population (even if you and I can hear the flaws), just as mid-priced systems with low-grade speaker sound fine to the millions who buy

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      Yes, MP3 is an aging format. But it is almost universally supported, requires very little in the way of processor power to decode (unlike many, more modern, formats), and is not associated with any one player or company in the game.

      When I rip today, I still rip to high-bitrate MP3. Yes, I know I would get more "bang for my buck" using a more modern format like wma, aac, or ogg. But, when I rip to MP3, I *know* it will be supported on everything from my Tivo, to my Xbox360, to whatever MP3 player I choose

    • Seriously, there is an excuse (Score:4, Insightful)

      by weinrich ( 414267 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:13AM (#19160039)

      MP4/AAC has been around for a while now, and there is no excuse for non-WMA stores to not be selling it...

      Excuse #1: Cannot play MP4's on an MP3 player

      Explaining to the average music consumer that they need to upgrade their MP3 player to an MP4 player is like explaining to a person with cataracts that they need to upgrade from regular TV to HD. Sure, it's the future, but don't expect them to run to the store any time soon. Without a groundswell of new consumers flocking to MP4, retailers are hard pressed to justify moving to MP4. Again, think HD.

      Perhaps someone should find a legislator to sponsor a bill to require music retailers to move to MP4 by 2010 so we can be forced to pay for high-definition music along with our high-definition video.

  • Quality (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ezekiel683 ( 739858 )
    Would work for most people for simple convienience. but I personally would not pay unless the quality was at least equal to that of a cd which i could order perhaps for less or same anyway with the actual packaging

    lossless (eg FLAC) is not so unreasonable with broadband these days
    • I imagine most stores have not done this because of bandwidth issues, but Amazon has a massive and low priced network infrastructure. The only reason for them not to do it is to distinguish the product from (the frequently cheaper) and higher quality CDs they aleady cell.

  • Price not set. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by s31523 ( 926314 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:19AM (#19159325)
    No mention of price in the article. While this sounds great, each song could be .50 or $5.00. This will dictate how cool it really is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Have Blue ( 616 )
      And there's no mention of bit rate. Apple's non-DRMed songs are 256K AAC. Amazon is going to have to really crank up LAME to produce MP3s that measure up to that.
  • This is a really fun and juicy story. It's just a shame they are talking about "later this year'. Assuming someone doesn't throw a monkey wrench into the works, and assuming this isn't some marketing guy's pipe dream, they still have to actually do it. And they have to do it well.

    Apple's iTunes has several things going for it. For starters, if you are showing up you've already got the iPod, the iTunes, etc. The iTunes store has a massive catalogue of music, so much so that I have yet to find something I wan
    • The big downside to me with iTunes is the same thing that keeps me using a Quicktime clone instead of Quicktime itself--namely, that iTunes and Quicktime are VERY aggressive about burying themselves deep into your computer and running in the background, consuming resources and making it very difficult to uninstall them (almost as bad as Realtime). The last time I installed Quicktime it buried itself in my system tray, overwrote my Quicktime clone, associated itself with formats that I specifically told it n
      • Never had the problems you described.

        And I use quicktime on both the Mac and PC.

        (Why the hell would you use a quicktime clone?)
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Apple fanboy?

        Well if you can name a comperable product I'm more than happy to consider it. In the meantime you can take the 10% you are saving (and spending by replacing 3 times as often) and I'll sit here, smug as can be with my happy Macbook, with apeloads of iTunes tracks on it, and a Nano leashed to my side happily living in utter bliss of the whole mess working together.

        Which is completely, but not entirely, unlike my experience with Windows, Linux, etc.

        And I HAVE experience with Windows, Linux, etc.

        I'
  • ...is to simply make CDs cost a reasonable amount. Oh, and have more than 1 good song on them.

    Let customers then encode as they see fit. I certainly don't want to pay for stuff that is lower quality, and cannot be used as a master to re-encode in different formats, or the same format with VBR, etc.

  • Available Internationally? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by owlman17 ( 871857 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:05AM (#19159893)
    It doesn't say in TFA if it will be. I do assume it will be available through the other Amazon channels: www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, etc.

    I'd like to be able to buy DRM-free, major tunes online aside from Emusic.com, where, except for a few selected tracks, everything is generally available for purchase anywhere in the world. iTunes, Napster, etc, DRM-infested as they are, would have made a killing by not limiting purchases to the US alone. Until they do open up, and I hope Amazon does, my purchases (and I know I'm not alone) would be limited to Emusic.com and several indie sites.

  • Corollary: why MP3 and not lossless compression? (Score:3, Informative)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:10AM (#19159989) Journal
    MP3s became very popular because the files were relatively small and hence, easier to download. There was a huge boom in downloaded and shared MP3s. But that was then (some 5-8 years ago), and this is now. We gots bandwidth. Why not offer the tracks in a lossless compressed formal, like FLAC? Or heck, uncompressed PCM? If I'm going to pay for the actual song, I want it in the best quality possible.
    • Your missing the important thing, MP3 players while small still aren't that big. Most people I know either own a Ipod Nano or a generic MP3 player (around 1GB memory.) Sure you can fit alot of songs onto a 4GB nano, but you find people prefer hundreds of songs over dozens.

      I have a WM5 phone with a 2GB memory card it shuffles its way through 10GB of 192kbps quality MP3's. If I could I would own a 10GB memory card, because I own low quality headphones i downgrade the MP3's to 128Kbps. For most people that i

    • Re:Corollary: why MP3 and not lossless compression (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:52AM (#19160811) Journal
      The reason is that MP3s play in every player without conversion. Most players can't convert on the fly. Media Monkey can, though not to MP4 yet, and even with a fast machine its slower than a straight copy,

      I would prefer FLAC (or even APE, since I just transcode to FLAC), but to be popular you have to be simple. MP3 is simple. You also need to appear to be "compact", so they'll proabably send them out at 128 or - if we're luckly 192kb. That may sound silly, but imagine the iTMS commercial that touts "If you download from iTMS, your player will hold twice as many songs as the leading competitor." Stupid but true.

      Now, if they were to offer a FLAC option, that would be awesome - but I'm not holding my breath. Somebody needs to swipe the AllOfMP3 engine, if you want to know my opinion. Now that the DRM beast is retreating, you may as well let people download whatever bit rate they want.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by kinglink ( 195330 )
        I've heard a lot about this ape and it's the reason why I'm mp3 only. Basically I've read up about ape, sounds really good, sounds interesting. However I've tried using ape which contained a japanese artist. Let's just say no player or converter worked 100 percent of the time.

        I couldn't find a single way to batch these files to Mp3, I saw .ape and .cue files as well, which if ape allows is just frightening.

        As you said Mp3s are simple, small and easier to use. OGG, FLAC, and APE have annoyed me in the p

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Overzeetop ( 214511 )
          You need to get Media Monkey [mediamonkey.com] and set up your portable devices with custom convert-on-the-fly sync rules. It's easy - even I managed to do it. If you've got a pretty static collection, you can convert-sync to another directory. That's what I did when my wife got an ipod - converted the 80GB of FLAC to 15GB of MP3, then let her sift it down to the 8GB of her device memory by cutting out the chuncks of my collection she never listens to. She's happy with iTunes, and I rip all our CDs and just give her an MP3 c
  • The fight against DRM seems to be heating up. MP3s seem to be getting more of the attention with regards to removing DRM. Why is it mostly music? Why aren't we getting the same for movies?

  • There is a very simple reason why DRM-free music is likely to be more expensive than the DRMed version, it is more valuable to the consumer. Think about it, what would you rather have? Because the DRM doesn't work anyway the only real difference between DRMed and DRM free music is that DRMed music adds an extra inconvenience. This makes it less desirable to consumers and thus companies will have to charge less to get the same demand. That the price of both DRMed and DRM-free music is high compared to CDs is

  • I wonder what their store will "look" like. Will it exist entirely within the web browser? Will they help organize your .mp3 library on your computer? Are they going to try to create their own music "ecosystem" to compete with iTunes/iTMS? Amazon could do anything here.

    Personally, I think making the store web-based would be a plus. But I think if they don't help manage your library, that's a minus. This being Amazon, I'm going to guess it will be web-based: click to download, and they'll forgo any attempt

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