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Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iPod
theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service that could be launched as soon as this summer. It would feature Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs."
With Apple having such dominance of the market, will they be able to compete? Afterall, even now every commonplace mp3 player is oten referred to as an iPod, so won't people just think of this as an "Amazon iPod"? Unless they have a few tricks up their sleeve, some people will take this as a cheap copy and want "the real thing (tm)"
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ipod killer huh? how many times have we heard that recently. It is interesting though that amazon is now in the hardware business. Oh wait, the article title "Plans Music Service To Rival iPod" is wrong.
:-p
Oh crap. they are getting into the hardware business.. and the article title is from the WSJ not slashdot. The summary says nothing about that though. i wonder how many people who didnt RTFA are going to post something like the paragraph above.
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It's just struck me that an interesting trend is occuring. During the 90's, the company that owned the software was the winner, in other words, Microsoft became so dominant in the PC industry because they dominated the OS space, the hardware just became a commodity. They (and pretty much everyone else) though the same thing would happen in the mobile and 'living room' spaces. But it's not - the hardware is becoming more important - Microsoft realise that they only way they are getting into people's living rooms is coming out with their own hardware (the X-Box). Similarly in the mobile space, it's the ones that control the hardware that are going to win - so to compete in the digital content market Amazon is having to make its own version of the iPod, and Microsoft is also considering it. So we have software companies and online shops turning into electronics manufacturers.
There is one way I can see an Amazon-branded player/service work, and that is for Amazon to pair digital downloads with physical purchases, at least optionally.
We are all impatient when we buy a new CD. We want to hear the music right now. For a lot of people, this means stealing a copy of the music to hear in the interim. Unfortunately for the industry, for a lot more, it means stealing the music outright and never paying for it.
So what if Amazon let me buy a CD on their site and then immediately download all the tracks to my Amazon-branded player, and then a few days later, the physical disc arrived in the mail for me to add to my collection, at which point I could erase the digital copy from my player, or just leave it there and continue to listen to that copy, secure in the knowledge that I have a physical copy, with artwork, securely stored at home?
The ability to buy online and listen instantly *coupled* with the ability to own a physical CD copy of something is the one thing every digital download service thusfar has failed to deliver and is the one reason I don't use any of them. I have an iPod, but I've never bought a single track from iTMS. I still buy CDs and rip them to mp3 to fill my iPod, and yes, sometimes I P2P a copy of something I've just bought, because I want to hear it without waiting for it to arrive.
If Amazon provided this kind of service, paired with a high quality, functional Amazon-branded player, I would seriously consider dumping my iPod for their player. I don't see any other program being successful for them.