Brief: Amazon to Offer Music From Sony Without DRM
297334
Amazon said the deal makes it the only retailer to offer customer DRM-free songs in the MP3 format.
70507
Sony BMG announces a deal with Amazon to put tracks online that are free of copy controls.
531386
Hoping to one-up Apple with its recent move away from digital rights management, high-quality music site MusicGiants began offering DRM-free music recently with the release of Paul McCartney's newest album, Memory Almost Full.
95279
Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads, also known as digital rights management (DRM).
232259
Yahoo is reportedly in talks with major labels about a DRM-free music store. to offer them either for sale or for free in an ad-supported model.
621847
Sony BMG Music Entertainment will crack open the door to its music vaults on Jan. 15, taking the DRM copy-prevention wrapper off a limited selection of downloadable tracks.The tracks will be offered in MP3 format, without DRM (digital rights management), from Jan. 15 in the U.S. and from late January in Canada.The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card&#39;s covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears&#39; &quot;Blackout&quot; and Barry Manilow&#39;s &quot;The Greatest Songs of the Seventies.&quot;In contrast, online retailer&#160;Amazon.com offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in MP3 format from the catalogs of EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and a host of independent record labels. Apple&#39;s&#160;iTunes Store has around 2 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in the AAC format supported by its iPod and many mobile phones. No store visit is necessary to download those tracks, and an album typically sells for $9.99 or less.About 4,500 retail outlets in the U.S. will sell the Platinum MusicPass cards by the end of the month, including Best Buy, Target, Trans World, Fred&#39;s, and Winn-Dixie, according to Sony-BMG. In Canada, the cards will sell through Best Buy, CD Plus, and Wal-Mart, and later through record store HMV.Online sales will &quot;ultimately be part of the game plan&quot; for at least one of those retail outlets, said a source familiar with the offering.With Valentine&#39;s Day approaching, Sony-BMG is counting on demand for gift cards to boost sales of the downloads, as well as the collectible nature of the cards themselves, which feature images of the artists and information about the albums.Sony-BMG will offer &quot;expanded&quot; versions of two of the initial offerings -- Celine Dion&#39;s &quot;Taking Chances&quot; and Kenny Chesney&#39;s &quot;Just Who I Am: Poets &amp; Pirates.&quot; These will retail for around $19.99 and in addition to the Platinum version will also include an additional album from the artist&#39;s back catalog.When they first considered online music sales, major record labels initially insisted that download services such as Apple&#39;s iTunes Store encrypt their tracks with DRM technology to prevent copying.Smaller labels sold unprotected MP3 files through sites like eMusic.com, gambling that the increased sales and notoriety that would come with easier access to their music would outweigh sales lost through unauthorized copying.That argument eventually won favor with Apple, which last May began offering tracks from EMI without DRM for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.Amazon followed suit in September, selling unprotected MP3 files from EMI and Universal. Warner joined them on Dec. 28.The record companies all say they hope the move will lead to greater online music sales.Sony-BMG said it hopes its combined model, selling a download pass through a physical store, will lead to greater sales of physical and digital music.Albums need a boost, as the number sold in the U.S. dropped again last year, even as the number of music purchases rose, market watcher Nielsen SoundScan reported last week.U.S. music buyers made 1.4 billion music purchases in 2007, up from 1.2 billion a year earlier, Nielsen said.Nielsen counts a purchase as an album, single, CD or online download. Within that figure, digital track sales rose from 582 million to 844 million as buyers cherry-picked the tracks they liked from albums available online, while physical album sales (whether sold in-store or over the Internet, but excluding downloads) fell to 451 million in 2007, from 556 million in 2006, it said.But if U.S. consumers are making more music purchases, they may be spending less: Nielsen also counts something it calls track-equivalent album sales, in which it counts 10 track downloads as the equivalent of an album. By that measure, track-equivalent album sales fell 9.5 percent to 585 million in 2007, from 646 million in 2007.&#160;
115088
Warner Music agrees to sell its music for download on Amazon in MP3 format without copy protection.
316433
Apple and online retailer Amazon are about to launch music download services, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
519796
It's the end of an era Amazon.com has now secured the right to sell DRM-free music from all four major labels, snagging Sony BMG.â¦
26431
(InfoWorld) - Yahoo put another music track without DRM (digital rights management) on sale through its Yahoo Music service Tuesday. The Norah Jones single "Thinking About You" sells for $0.99, in MP3 format on Yahoo's music store, and in DRM-encumbered AAC format on Apple Computer's iTunes Store. Both formats will play on PCs, Macs, and the market-leading iPod portable music player, but only the MP3 version will play on other portable music players. DRM technology is used to set limits on how, when, how many times, and on what devices a file may be played. While DRM can be applied to music in AAC, ATRAC, or WMA format, it cannot be introduced into MP3 files. Yahoo first experimented withÂ selling MP3 files without DRMÂ in July, when it offered Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" as an MP3 file for $1.99. While that track was not tied to a particular PC or music player with DRM, the audio track was personalized to contain a first name of the purchaser's choice, picked from a list of hundreds of prerecorded names, limiting its interest to other listeners. Since then, Yahoo has sold an entire album by the artist Jesse McCartney in both MP3 and the DRM-encumbered WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but has not published sales figures for the two formats. Some see the release of tracks in MP3 format, without DRM, as a big gamble for record labels, as nothing prevents buyers from uploading them to file-sharing networks. In reality, DRM does little to stop such behavior, but makes life harder for legitimate music users, said analyst Mark Mulligan, a vice president at Jupiter Research in the U.K. "Most of the DRM in place is not going to stop piracy. You've got limits on CD-burning, but all of that is cracked immediately if you burn it onto CD and rip it back in again. Anyone with an ounce of tech-savvy is going to know how to get around that," he said. But the fact that there's nothing to stop listeners copying and sharing MP3 files could work to record labels' advantage, said Mulligan. "It's going to be implemented more as marketing than anything else," he said. Blue Note Records, the record label promoting the Jones track, is only releasing the single, not an entire album, in MP3 format for now. If Mulligan is right, it could be just a marketing gimmick to build awareness of the album, which will go on sale in January. Major record labels are starting toÂ look more seriously at MP3 distributionÂ because of the success of eMusic.com, which Mulligan says is the second-largest online music download store in the U.S., after that of Apple. EMusic sells music from independent record labels in MP3 format.
306555
With digital rights management on music purchases now the norm, record labels have turned to a unique, if not ironic, approach to gain added promotion: DRM-free tracks. Hollywood Records has teamed up with Yahoo to do just that, selling a special MP3 version of Jesse McCartney's new album Right Where You Want Me.
82270
Amazon MP3, which only sells music without digital rights management copy protection, now has licensing deals with all four major music labels. Watch out, iTunes.
158998
In the latest proof that the label is at least testing DRM-free music sales, consumers can buy gift cards from physical stores and redeem digital albums online. The bad news is that the music is also "anonymously watermarked."
509869
Amazon.com plans to open an online music store offering only songs that are free of copy-protection technology and can be played on anything from PCs to portable gadgets such as Apple's iPod or Microsoft's Zune
222365
BusinessWeek.com reports that Sony BMG will offer some of its collection free of copy-protection software in coming weeks.
58020
DRM-free service to roll out this year Presenting possibly the biggest threat to the dominance of iTunes so far, Amazon.com has announced it will commence an international roll-out of Amazon MP3, it's DRM-free digital music store, this year.â¦
327974
DRM-free at last? Amazon looks set to plough into the digital music market next year. The retailer started romancing music labels last week.â¦