Sony/Amazon Download Deal

Sony Music has announced a deal with Amazon regarding its entire catalogue of music tracks that lack copy protection making it will be possible to download these tracks on Amazon by the end of January.

This service will only be available in America at the present time and there haven’t been any announcements at this time about when or whether the service will be expanded overseas.

All of the songs on Amazon’s store will be free of controversial Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls.

Songs prepared in the MP3 format can be played on any portable music player. Tracks protected with DRM software are typically bound to one service or a particular portable player. If tracks are DRM free, there is no limit to their use by people who download them.

Sales of downloadable tracks have doubled in countries such as the UK, but purchasers have been frustrated by the limit set on the use of their tracks by DRM.

Sony announced a plan to sell gift cards that let customers download albums free of DRM in January and last February, (2007), Apple boss Steve Jobs called on record labels to stop using DRM in a bid to boost the popularity of downloadable music.

Source: BBC News & MJWN