Sep

12

Amazon to Launch Music Service

September 12, 2007 |

Amazon, according to an article at Billboard, is about to launch its own music service, depending on Jeff Bezos greenlighting the launch this week:

The much-anticipated music service from Amazon could go live as early as Tuesday, Billboard.biz has learned. The company has been testing the service internally for the last several weeks, and is presenting the results to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for final approval.

Clearly, they are set up to fail. The only music companies on board are EMI and certain releases from Universal Music Group will also be available, as well as a number of independent labels.

And there is the problem. Nobody gives a crap what label is responsible for what music. If Amazon can’t offer a broad range of music, no consumer is going to spend any time trying to buy it there. Once I don’t find a song on Amazon, I am just going back to iTunes.

Besides that, they are planning a four tiered pricing scheme. Why? Keep it simple. According to the article, this scheme is attractive to the labels. Rule of thumb: if it is attractive to the labels, it is going to suck for the consumer.

However, given that they have more pricing tiers than labels, I don’t think anybody is going to care much for this anyway…

More discussion at paidContent.org and Mashable

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